Putting Special Moments in the Bank

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I’m a latecomer to the mindfulness party. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right, and anyone who is a heavy meditator or Zen Buddhist will probably be doing a lot of eye-rolling right now. But I’m trying to get better at “banking” important moments as they occur.

I should take a second to explain how this came about. I heard a podcast featuring author A.J. Jacobs, who recently wrote Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey. In focusing on things that he was grateful for, he began to notice that life is filled with incredible moments. Sometimes he was NOT held up in the checkout line. Sometimes all the lights were green as he was going somewhere. He started “banking” those moments in his mind, so that later, when he inevitably got caught by dozens of red lights while running errands, or got stuck behind someone with 50 items in the “20 items or less” express line, he could remind himself that life wasn’t always so frustrating. There were moments when things worked out amazingly in his favor. That’s a good lesson to remember, but to draw on our good experience “bank account” we have to notice those experiences when they happen.

So I’ve started thinking about moments during the past week that were bankable. There are way too many to list here, but I’ll share a few. My wife and I went out for ice cream. There is no greater lover of ice cream than my wife, and to watch her experience something she loves is a great moment. I watched the Super Bowl with some of my best friends and we laughed until we couldn’t breathe. I held a kitten in my lap and experienced the feeling of having something small and vulnerable trust me completely. I’m going to do my best to have those handy on days when it seems that nothing is going well or I’m just cranky with everyone and everything, including the cats.

These moments happen scores of times every day, but I miss them so often because I take them for granted or simply don’t take time to notice. There will be the song that gives me chills despite having heard it a hundred times. There is the cluster of red berries on a cold grey day when everything seems stark and lifeless. There will be the time when someone does a little something extra on my behalf that they didn’t have to do. These are the moments that I’ll try to remember when I complain about the music that the kids are listening to, when winter seems a little too long and a little too hard, or when I fall into the people-are-no-darn-good way of thinking.

So I really don’t know if I’m practicing mindfulness in the way that some people use the term, but I am trying to pay more attention. Paying attention to the good moments, the ones that give me joy, no matter how briefly. They’ll come in handy on days when life gets a little rough around the edges.