Charting a Truer Course

I missed the mountain laurel this year. Last year I thought there was nothing more magical than a hillside full of blooming laurel and I swore I’d come back every year to see it. It was on my mental calendar. Having seen it in all its glory, now I “needed” to see it every year.

Yet the time has come and gone this year and I missed the mountain laurel. As I realize this a prick of guilt and disappointment causes the heart to seize for a moment. How could I have missed the mountain laurel? Regret, recrimination, and rue wag their fingers at me, and a sense of lacking takes over. I must put it on the calendar for next year and make sure I go…..

And then mindfulness kicks in and I notice the path my mind is leading me down: so different than the path that led me to the laurel last year. We hadn’t gone to the mountain expecting to see it, on a mission to see it… needing to achieve seeing it. We had been there on a sunny Saturday afternoon and so had the laurel, and we had noticed and rejoiced in it.

It dawns on me then: it wasn’t the laurels that brought the joy. It was being present for the laurels in the moment when we beheld them. In that moment, and the moments that led up to it, there was no sense that happiness depended on seeing those laurels.

When I look back on “what went wrong” and how “I screwed up my chance to see the laurels” I realize that when the time came to go back to the mountain to see the laurel again I had been elsewhere, enraptured with the natural beauty of the heron on the pond, or basking in some much appreciated time with friends, or even in the flow of chores done mindfully. In the moments when I was experiencing each of those joys they were no less bouying than the joy of seeing the laurels. It’s just a trick of the mind that rewrites history, if I let it, and leaves a mark of disappointment where once elation glowed.

Thanks to the practice of noticing the mind’s activity, I see the path my mind is leading me down, and I smile. I didn’t miss the mountain laurel this year. I exalted in them last year, an experience which I still carry with me. And this year there were new experiences. Who knows what the future brings - joy exists in more than last year’s laurels. And so I leave the mind behind and chart a truer course to happiness.

May all beings everywhere chart their own true course to happiness,

Your CMP family