Mindfulness — or more often than not, Mindlessness

This morning while looking out our bedroom window that overlooks my precious vegetable garden Russ calmly says, “There are three deer outside.”

I jump from bed and flew open the sash and scream at these unknowing thieves at the top of my lungs, which most of you know is quite an unholy sound.  The two does and one buck lazily look up at me, some 100 feet in the air from them and feel no fear what so ever.

It took Russ running outside, clapping loudly to run off the pepper-plant-eating-vermin.  Now I don’t want to hear from all you Bambie lovers until you have had a few hundred plants that you tended lovingly from seedling into just-about-to-bear-beautiful-fruit-full-grown-plants mindlessly gnawed on by deer who decide half-way through destruction that maybe this was not what they were craving.

Mindlessness is something we all can be accused of.  Just last weekend I received an invitation from a relative I refuse to name for a family reunion on May 4.  This being May 30 I consulted another relative who had received the same card and we quickly figured out she meant August 4.

Later that day I went to visit a different relative, whom I also refuse to name, who had ruined a pair of $6,700 hearing aids because she had put them in the microwave.  Apparently she was supposed to put just one small part in the microwave to clean it, but in a moment of distraction she just put the whole thing in the cleaning tube and sparked it all up.

Those mindless eating deer drove me to such perturbation that while making my standard breakfast of high protein Special K with some beautiful sweet blackberries I poured iced tea on it rather than milk.  As soon as I saw that brown liquid rise to flake level I came too and quickly dumped the liquid out of the bowl while holding all the solids in place.

Since the tea was in just a moment the flakes were still crisp, thanks to that industrialization process Kelloggs perfected to help keep cereal from turning to mush within seconds of liquid touching it.  I went to the fridge and pulled out the bottle of Maple View Farms skim milk, which had only about one cereals’ worth still in it.  I tipped the bottle up and poured the remaining milk into the bowl only to be met by a yogurt like substance covering my delicate blackberries and doomed flakes.

Cursing the deer for diverting my attention away from my regular routine of always smelling the milk before pouring (there is no excuse for the tea) I realized how easy it is to get distracted from doing the simplest things.

So is the case with heathly eating.  I know that I can go mindlessly about eating something I shouldn’t and never really realize, appreciate or register that I have eaten it.

With this wake up call I am dedicating myself to mindfulness.  Not just about eating, but about living, and a little about finding those deer and scaring them so badly that they vow to never come near my garden again.