Focus on the light

The first time I was on stage as a child, I noticed it right away.

I couldn’t see the audience. They were there. I could hear them but the stage lights muddled their faces and left a smudge of hazy light and shapes.

I remember finding great comfort in that.

It meant that I could more easily focus my attention on the performance, rather than the audience’s reaction to it. I could be completely present.

Bathed in light and confident in the moment because there were no outside forces or expectations or reactions clamoring for my attention or influencing my behavior.

I could simply trust what I had been training to do. And in that was a freedom I had never known.

It would take another decade and a half before I made another similar discovery that would change my life.

I was 25 and sitting on the hardwood floor of a large space in the hills of Pali Hill in Mumbai, India. The sun was setting through the large open windows that wrapped around the humble square building.

The sweat was sliding from my head down my cheeks and making its way to my thighs. I watched the droplets fall. We were meditating.

I kept fidgeting in the heat, grasping for the calm sense of peace that was supposed to come with meditating. The light in the room was slowing fading but for the sleepy sun coming through the room.

And I stared at the shape it made on the floor. When the sun was nearly gone, it seemed to make a warm circle of light on the floor just a foot in front of my body. I wiggled over to it. My sticky legs rubbing against the floor.

I sat in its embrace. It was just big enough to cover all of me. Like a warm golden sheet. I closed my eyes and remembered the spot light on stage. The light that blurs all the rest of the world watching and waiting.

It occurred to me, sitting there as the city went from day to night, that it didn’t matter where I was, or what I was doing, I could always return to my spotlight. My breath. To the present time. To the moment.

An actor trains to create truth in an imaginary circumstance.

We bring the imaginary to life. The only way to fully commit to that truth is behave and respond from one moment to the next as organically as you can.

This means listening to what is actually happening. Not your perception of it, or what you anticipate will happen, or what you hope will happen, but to what transpires from moment to moment.

Mindfulness asks us to do the same.

To breathe into the now. Without judgement, or preconceived notions, or plans. To let what is happening happen, and to listen and respond in that moment, with a breath and another and another.

We never have as much time on this earth as we’d like, but we can be as available to it as we like should we choose to notice the moments and be in them as fully as we can. With judgement on hold, with all our senses participating and our heart open.

The tools an actor learns to create truth in an imaginary circumstance, combined with the tools of mindfulness, can jolt us into the now.

For now is all we actually have to enjoy.