There are those days when it’s hard to see what’s in front of us. Whatever is next is occupying seven eighths of the mind while the other eighth is trying to block out the annoyances of the day-the dirty dishes in the sink (placed in the sink if I’m lucky), “Is this water or pee?”, bills from the orthodontist, “Why is my wool sweater in the dryer?,” the Covid 15 (only 15 lbs if I’m lucky). It’s easy on those days to get stuck in the mindset of imagining life different than it is, “better” than it is, and thinking the “if only’s.” “If only I had more time to exercise, if only we had grandparents close by to help out, if only my husband wasn’t so stressed out from work…”
Even with all my meditating, I still have these kinds of days, so I run a little thought experiment to reorient my perspective. There was this movie I saw a long time ago, it was called “AI” as in Artificial Intelligence. It was kind of creepy and I don’t remember most of it, but there is this scene where the protagonist child robot, who being a robot is immortal, has been entombed in a car for thousands of years and is discovered by the advanced species of the time who have the ability to reconstruct a single day of the past. The boy robot’s day is not something spectacular, it’s a day at the home where he used to live with his “mother,” and an animatronic teddy bear playing hide and seek and laying in the sun. I have a point in describing…
