Whew!  It has been a crazy week!  My sister is getting married in less than four weeks, so the whole family has been in something of a tizzy attempting to prepare.  (Various circumstances have interfered with preparations up to this point, so we’re really just now getting started; it’s been nuts!)  Between that and first-trimester ickies (I haven’t been really sick, but I haven’t felt quite up to par, either.), please forgive me if I remain a little scarce for the next several weeks.  (Bekah’s wedding and the end of my first trimester coincide, to the day, so hopefully things will ease up a bit after that. 🙂 )

In the meantime, I had a post planned ‘specially for last Friday, and I completely forgot to post it because I was at Bekah’s helping get invitations ready to go out.

Mindfulness

I have recently been reading a book called The Mindful Way Through Depression.  (It’s one of those I expected to have to do quite a bit of “seed-spitting” through – you know, keeping the good stuff and spitting out the seeds.)  One of the early sections was talking about mindfulness in general – that is, being really aware of where we are, what we’re doing, what our surroundings are, etc.  Or, to put it another way, being truly present in whatever we’re doing.

An Experiment

In order to illustrate how little we tend to do this, the authors described an experiment that was done to measure people’s distractibility.  On some college campus (I forget which one), the researchers had someone ask a student walking across campus for directions.  During the course of their encounter, it was arranged for two people to walk between the questioner and the individual giving directions, carrying a door.

While the door was between the two conversants, the questioner was replaced – by someone of a completely different size, with different clothing, and a different voice.  If I remember the numbers correctly, the first time they did this experiment, only 44% of the people noticed.  The second time, only 33% noticed!  (Those numbers are at least very close, if not precisely correct.)

Paying Attention to People

As my husband and I discussed the experiment, we each arrived at the same conclusion – that the reason for the lack of observation here was probably not the level of distractibility of the participants; rather, it probably reflects how much – or how little – we tend to pay attention to the people we are talking to, even when we’re willing to help them.

So let me challenge you (as I was challenged, on reading this!) to really see those you come into contact with.  Asking the cashier at the grocery store how she is, and really caring about the answer, or asking that garage sale hostess how her day has gone, can really mean a lot, because people are used to other people not paying attention.