If you follow me on Instagram (HeydayMelissa), you may have noticed that in recent months, I regularly post photos of things I see on my (almost) daily walks in my neighborhood. Walking has been a regular practice in my life since I was a little girl who liked to take walks around the farm in the rain. When my husband and I moved to Spartanburg, we chose our neighborhood in part because it would allow me the luxury of walking to work. The walk to the office gave me time to mentally prepare for the day, and the walk home was a tool to decompress. Since I retired from teaching, I’ve continued to make walking a pretty regular part of my routine. As I have written elsewhere, when the stay-at-home orders were issued last spring, my walks became a lifeline for managing my stress.
At first, my shelter-in-place walks felt a little like a forced march as I concentrated on accumulating my daily steps and relieving my anxiety. But it wasn’t long before I began noticing new things around the neighborhood: more kids out on bikes or playing in the backyard, lovely and inspirational chalk messages on the sidewalks, teddy bears and rainbows in windows. Most of my neighbors were seeking new coping strategies, too, and they were trying to inspire each other. I began to make it a practice to look for new and inspirational things on my walk. I photographed them and made posting them on my Instagram feed an intentional practice.
As spring exploded and then gave way to summer, I posted photos of the beautiful flowers in my neighbors’ yards. I captured shots of the goats who came to live temporarily in an overgrown green space in the neighborhood. After a period of heavy rains, the mushroom population exploded, and I posted a half dozen striking varieties of the fungi. As flowers have begun to fade this fall, I’ve had to look more carefully and deliberately for things to photograph and share. That’s when I began to notice the multitude of shades of green in the neighborhood. Soon I was posting a series called #50shadesofgreen.
Taking these photographs has become part of my daily practice. Leadership coach Jim Marsden defines a practice as “your way of regularly engaging an activity that supports you in your growth, your self-awareness, and your understanding of your humanity and self in relationship to anything and everything that lies beyond you.” He writes, “Ultimately, a practice supports us, helps us grow, cultivates curiosity and imagination, affirms our humanity.”
I’ve written before about the nature of practice and the importance of incorporating practice into your life. I call my practice of deliberately observing the beauty in my neighborhood and sharing it with others a practice of noticing. To notice something is to become conscious of it or to treat it with some degree of attention. Noticing is the ultimate expression of mindfulness.
I spend way too much of my life rushing around thinking about the next thing on my to-do list. Even my daily walks can become one more item on the to-do list. Incorporating my own practice of noticing into my walks has helped me slow down and be conscious of the beauty around me. I look forward to my walks more and return more refreshed because I stopped to notice the beauty in the midst of the chaos that forms our days right now.
What about you? What practices are helping you stay centered right now? I’d love to hear from you. And if you’re looking for a mindfulness practice of your own, you might try fashioning your own version of a practice of noticing.
For more of Jim Marsden’s writings on practice, click here.
