@waylonlewis on Instagram: Yaffo, Israel, off the beach.

 

I’m traveling. I don’t have time to write my weekly editor’s letter. I don’t have time to pause. I don’t have time to edit, or write, or work, or breathe in and out. I was in Tel Aviv this morning, and Sweden, now, for a wedding. I don’t have time.

That’s how we all are, right? Even in our daily lives, we think—I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy. That’s the modern mantra of our speedy society. If there’s a gap of space, of breath, we reach for our smart phones. 150 times a day, on average. Pretty stupid.

So I do have time. I’d like to say hello to you. To make eye contact, and smile, and talk. A lady on the plane did that with me, and turned me from a quiet napping tired Colorado cowboy alone on a plane into a human being, again. Smiling, laughing, sharing, thinking, learning, listening. Then, a pair of businesswomen from London did the same thing with me on the high-speed train in Stockholm. Talking, listening, learning, laughing.

Life is so short, so sweet, that it’s easy to ignore it and just move quickly. We don’t have time for life.

But at the end of the day, at the end of the another year—a New Year, or a year older—we have these moments of lonely appreciation, of cherishing our sweet world and our place and time in it.

Let’s do that everyday. Every moment, when we think of it.

That’s what meditation is.

We lose our minds? No problem. We notice we’ve done so—and come back to the present.

We practice doing that again and again.

That’s meditation practice. Here’s how to do it.

Here’s a “Best of Elephant Journal” article about how to leave the Glorification of Busy behind.

If you’d like to follow my first-ever adventures in this small world of ours (Israel, Sweden, Florence, DC for the 4th, Virginia, then back to Colorado) find me on instagram at @waylonlewis or read my journal here.