Chasing Moments of Awe

This week, like more than an estimated 30 million other people, Ruari and I witnessed the total eclipse. We had traveled to Austin Texas, and met with Julia’s side of the family. We set up at a playground, where Ruari and his cousin exhausted themselves and made friends while the adults caught glances at the passage of the moon in front of the sun behind passing clouds.

It was a cloudy and overcast day but the weather was fair enough to witness all of totality, and it was humbling.

One thing that makes it easier to understand grief and human suffering is to experience something that makes you feel simultaneously connected to millions of people while also massively insignificant in the context of the universe. 

I’m grateful for the privilege to witness such a sight, and it was intentional that we made the trip to see totality because awe plays an important part in grieving.

Awe doesn’t have to be some grand cosmic event, there is already so much to marvel at in the natural world, and it can all be healing when experienced from a place of mindfulness.

In the week leading up to the eclipse, Ruari and I had traveled to see my host parents from when I was an exchange student (they had also known and loved Julia since she was a girl), along with my own parents in South Carolina. Then we went on to North Carolina for the wedding of my wife’s close friend from childhood (the bride had also been a bridesmaid at our wedding).

I love the Carolinas because they remind me of Scotland. And you would think that after such an eventful week I would feel homesick, lovesick, and all kinds of devastating shades of grief but, really, through mindfulness, I was in a present-minded place of gratitude, humility and hope.

Mindfulness is an attitude of savoring the present moment, not dwelling in the past or in the future, which are both places we can’t control.

Mindfulness was something Julia and I worked hard on through her battle with brain cancer, where regrets and lost ambitions are all too easy to dwell on, and it is something I continue that is healing both because it keeps me in the present moment, while also honoring a strength cultivated with my wife at a time of great adversity.

Over the past week, I traveled through spaces I had already visited with Julia (we went to North Carolina on a honeymoon road trip). There was a necessary (and difficult) balance in both carrying precious memories, while moving forward and creating new ones.

My process for balancing the absence of my wife is to be present in the present moment, and to look for happiness where I’m at because it’s within me.

This mindset came from Julia’s interest in mindfulness, particularly through the work of ​​Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as my interest in stoicism.

Marcus Aurelius had written how “the present is all we have to live in, or to lose,” and I often think of what is lost when we drift outside of the present moment.

Personally, I like to think of the song Siesta by Ezra Collective and Emily Sandé, especially the line:

Let go of the shackles of

Your futurе and your past

The present is a present and

The only thing that lasts

Whenever I dwell on how the past has passed, or that my future will be spent without my wife, I do feel shackled. Shackled because there is no control over past or future. Memories are great, imagined futures can be fun, but our attachment to them can lead down a difficult path towards anxiety, towards pain, towards suffering.

To be in the present moment is liberating.

This time in the Carolinas, we spent lots of time out in nature hiking, running and cycling. I always think that Julia’s in the wind and it keeps me present, it keeps her present.

The wind blowing in from the west across the Appalachian Mountains, looking out from the peaks of our trails, putting our feet in the pools beneath beautiful waterfalls; these were moments of awe, and this is how I move forward while holding space for the past.

With all this hiking, running, cycling (and dancing), my feet have been feeling the strain. While I rest them, it’s time to get back in the pool, which is my weakest sport in the triathlon and the only one causing me anxiety - now is the perfect opportunity to practice mindfulness in my day to day training.