Mindful Poetry: "Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle" by Alison Luterman
Think back to the last time you lost your temper…
Was it because of something out of your control? For example (not that this has happened to me recently, at all), someone stopped directly in front of the thing you need at the store who stands there FOREVER!!
Regardless of how much patience we all possess, sometimes things that are absolutely inconsequential to others get throughly under our skin.
Today’s poem by Alison Luterman very thoughtfully and beautifully shifts the part adigm on how you view inconveniences.
I love using this poem for my MBSR classes because it allows my students to notice how they respond to outside stressors and change the way they view other’s actions.
Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle
Alison Luterman
Try to love everything that gets in your way:
the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps
murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane
while you execute thirty-six furious laps,
one for every item on your to-do list.
The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the water
like a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side,
whose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.
Teachers all. Learn to be small
and swim through obstacles like a minnow
without grudges or memory. Dart
toward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking Obstacle
is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girl
idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:
Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,
in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.
Be glad she’ll have that to look at all her life,
and keep going, keep going. Swim by an uncle
in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew
how to hold his breath underwater,
even though kids aren’t allowed at this hour. Someday,
years from now, this boy
who is kicking and flailing in the exact place
you want to touch and turn
will be a young man, at a wedding on a boat
raising his champagne glass in a toast
when a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.
He'll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,
but he'll come up like a cork,
alive. So your moment
of impatience must bow in service to a larger story,
because if something is in your way it is
going your way, the way
of all beings; towards darkness, towards light.
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