SPIRITUALITY & WELLNESS
The
Practice of Attention
Lloyd Den Boer
There I was , a mildly disgruntled teenager , fashionably trailing behind my family as we made slow progress from one lacklustre zoo exhibit to the next .
Paying slight attention to the animals around me , I let my mind drift away into a landscape of its own making . That changed as we approached the tiger ’ s cage . There the tiger was — in all its softly robed ferocity — fretfully padding back and forth in a pen too small for an animal that had been built for vast spaces . As if at the end of an invisible tether , the tiger paced and turned , and paced and turned , and , with each turn , I became more uneasy . The big cat was acting out a mental state I recognized — a vexed mind compulsively retracing worries until the very path it travels feels like a cage . This thing a mind can do — circling back and forth through worries on a tether of its own making — is a kind of misery . Shel Silverstein captured the experience for children in a poem about “ whatifs .” The poem ’ s speaker is a child who describes himself lying comfortably in bed , thinking , when his mind is overtaken by a long list of fears . He worries that he might be beat up ; that someone might slip poison in his cup ; that he might start to cry ; or that he might get sick and die ; and on and on . As the child describes one fear after another , we readers
see how Silverstein used comedy to keep an uncomfortable experience in check .
Some of us know all about meddling “ whatifs ”; others have more experience with “ whys .” Why did I say that ? Why did I do such a foolish thing ? Why are they cruel to me ? Why did this calamity befall me ? In addition to the burden of our worries about the future or our regrets about the past , when these are presented to us in intrusive unhappy thoughts , we are even more distressed . Control of our
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