Sometime during the past 8 months, I have renewed two very small things that have subsequently felt like two very big things in terms of their effect on my personal joy, comfort, and general sense of wellbeing. There have been more than these two things of course, and I will mention them in this post, but these two lead the way in how unassuming they are in spite of the impact that they have imparted in the fabric of my daily living.
The first easy peasy practice that I picked up again a few weeks into Covid Reality was to reinstate making granola once a week or so. So small and simple and easy that it barely merits mentioning. But nonetheless, I find it to be immediately satisfying and grounding. I loosely go off of this recipe because it is delicious and because in general I am just scrambling and working with what I have. The grounding bit of this is not the gathering of ingredients. It is the recognition that I have everything that I need and that I can almost instantly bring the component parts together to make something else entirely that manages all at once to be both humble and satisfying.
The other small thing is that early on in the pandemic I began ordering fine loose teas. Mostly black teas, an occasional Earl Grey for Maple and Chris, an exploration of Assams and Yunnans for myself, and the occasional Oolong thrown in for afternoon enjoyment. I order teas from an importer that I was introduced to long ago by my old friends and owners of Wonder State Coffee, with whom we would place massive bulk orders and who, I think, also recognize that there are some difficulties that no amount of coffee in the world can remedy. That is the time for a hearty cuppa of rich black tea to step in, preferably with some heavy cream and local honey demonstrative of all the love and care needed to survive yet another day. It has felt luxurious and simple all at once, and I have whole-heartedly enjoyed the return of tea making and drinking back into my daily living.
Both small things, right? Making granola, making tea. But they share a common element of Hygge that feels like very much the right thing to lean into during the endless days at home that are the current life and times. They provide comfort: a bit of slowness, some sensory satisfaction. My joy at these two renewed discoveries has me thinking a lot at the power of the One Small Act, the simple, doable, daily behaviors that have the possibility of shifting our entire trajectory, simply by adjusting our state for a few moments, or minutes, or longer.
This concept draws heavily on a teaching that my dear friend and co-conspirator on the path of personal an collective transformation, Rachel Peters, taught during our in-person Practice Wellness Community intensive in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. She called it the one-degree shift. What is the one thing that you can begin to do right now that is so slight and yet is just enough- one degree- to set you on an entirely different course than had you not implemented it? It will completely change where you are headed.
There are other activities or behaviors that I have implemented this year with this principle in mind. Daily meditation is certainly one. I have meditated with more regularity and frequency over the last eight months than I have in my entire life of practice. And this practice has shifted me. But it continues to be a daily choice and that is perhaps the aspect of it that is spilling over with more potency into other aspects of my life. I think that the concept of choice is central. There are choices that I make that dead-end me in terms of the subsequent choices that are born out of the initial one, and vice versa. And I want to make the choices that open doors, not the ones that predetermine me toward other, not so life serving choices. Examples of this are obvious, I hope, but to name a few… I am more served by the decision to not drink and to sleep more. To move my body and breath in big and meaningful ways and then to be still and quiet when it is time. To eat good food and to invest my time in the fresh air and sunshine. To wash and care for my body in loving and kind and life-serving ways. To make granola and hot tea for myself and my family. To write. To read. To orient myself around inspiration. To make my eyes new every day so that I can see the wonder of it all again for the first time. Like a toddler. Waking up to the world.
You see? My choice. Your choice. Especially during a time when the freedom and agency of so many of our choices are on the line. Maybe I am leaving this here as a reminder to myself. That One Small Act is sometimes the most Radical Act that we can make toward effecting meaningful and lasting change. In our own lives, yes. But I think that it is more than that. And that our agency to choose must be called to that. The impact of each little gesture, decision, shift, is affecting so much more than just our small sphere. If we are learning anything during the time of Covid let it be that: we are connected, that we matter, that our choices matter. Every small, little, everyday act, perhaps even more than any big and sweeping, potentially unsustainable gesture. Our sphere of influence is potentially vast. I want to live in that awareness.
*edited to say: listen. I know that I have been kind of emphasizing this whole thing around abstaining from drinking and to a lesser extent social media in the last couple of posts. But I want to be clear, I really have no moral thing around it. And I don’t think that I believe in any sort of absolutism- unless we are talking about the fact that the Republican Party is corrupt to its very core and that Donald Trump Has Got To Go… In general, I tend to think that my psychology does poorly with any sort of hard and fast rules and that the rebel in me, well, wants to rebel. Really it is just that I am noticing the way in which these activities make me feel like I am forfeiting an aspect of my freedom around choice. And also they sometimes make me feel like I am slowly poisoning myself. But look. Everyone is different. And everyone responds differently to different stimuli. This is in no way meant to be taken as some kind of dogmatic dispensing of judgment. Ok? Ok.