The optometrist says my eyes
are getting better each year.
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.
What’s next? The light step I had at six?
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taut as a drum?
My improved eyes and I
walked around town and celebrated.
We took in the letters
of the marquee, the individual leaves
filling out the branches of the sycamore,
an early moon.
So much goes downhill: our joints
wearing out with every mile,
the delicate folds of the eardrum
exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.
The way the heart still beats time
in the cathedral of the ribs.
And the mind, watching its parade of thoughts
enter and leave, begins to see them
for what they are: jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats
tossing their batons in the air.
by Danusha Laméris
Someone in a mindfulness session recently said they had come to the conclusion that gratitude was a secret superpower. When it bubbles up, it can change everything even though nothing is different, and it can open up perspectives and possibilities where before there seemed none. I thought of this when I read the above poem, and wondered if it was Danusha Laméris‘ gratitude that had facilitated this experience of becoming witness to the jumble of thoughts…
Luckily, there are many ways to change the relationship we have with our thoughts, and taste the freedom that this can bring. And with practice, it becomes easier… and if you fancy practising that alongside others, there’s a course to do just that coming up before long!
Photo by Alex Alvarez on Unsplash