the playground as meditation

Recently my friend Melanie admitted that she doesn’t like the playground. She called this a “really embarrassing” confession, which made me feel kind of, well, embarrassed, since it had never before occurred to me that not liking the playground was so unusual.

I guess I had always figured most of us hate it. That it would take a very special kind of person to really enjoy sitting out in the hot sun, pushing the swing over. And over. And over. (“Ugh, there’s SWINGS here. Why do playgrounds always have to have SWINGS?” I’ve been known to complain.) That, while most of us enjoy watching our children enjoy themselves, we don’t necessarily enjoy trying to keep them from going up the slide the wrong way, or darting in and out of play structures to keep up with them. This is why I usually gravitate toward small, enclosed parks where I can sit on a bench and read or chat with a friend while they play. Of course, you can’t get much reading or conversing done when you’re busy chasing after small bolters or being interrupted by sand-throwing toddlers.

Tonight I decided to try something else instead. My kids wanted to go to a decidedly not-small park; one of those behemoths with a huge play structure–complete with lots of tubes, tunnels and other places a small child can disappear–right in the middle and no helpful fences enclosing the young fry. There were swings, too; lots of swings. (Even a tire swing, which you will know if you spend as much time at playgrounds as I have, is far more energy-intensive to push then a regular swing.)

The park was crowded, all four boys wanted to do different things, and there was basically no way I was going to get away with perching on a bench. So I decided to use the playground as a form of meditation.

One of the very first articles I ever wrote was on the concept of walking meditation. The basic idea is this: instead of sitting still and focusing on your breath or a mantra (which has always been very difficult for me), you apply a meditative focus to the experience of walking: the feel of your feet rolling forward on the pavement with each step, the gentle swing of your arms, the breeze on your face. Whenever your mind wanders away from the present (as it will) and you find yourself thinking about what you’ll do when you get where you’re going or wondering what your bank balance is or worrying about some upcoming confrontation, you gently bring your awareness back to the steps you’re taking, the swing of your arms, the feel of the breeze.

So I decided I’d try my own version of walking meditation: playground meditation. I decided I’d follow my younger sons as they ran willy-nilly to and from pieces of equipment, but try to keep my mind free of the following thoughts: “I hope they don’t go for the swingset next” or “I wonder what that woman over there is eating and I wish I had some.” I would not read my e-mail from my cell, send any text messages, or check the time over and over to see if an acceptable amount of time had passed so we could leave. I would not daydream about a purchase I wanted to make or an essay I wanted to write. I would simply…be…at the playground, for the next half-hour or forty-five minutes or–shudder–hour.

It went pretty well…for twenty minutes or so. I felt the sun on my face, the crunch of the wood chips beneath my feet, the breeze in my hair. I watched my sons run and jump and run and jump and jump and run and climb and climb, jump, and run. When they said “Look at me, Mom!” I really looked rather than just saying “I see you!” I helped them up ladders and down slides. They did indeed head for the swings. I pushed and pushed and pushed some more without trying to remind them that if they’d just learn to pump their legs already they wouldn’t always have to come to me for help. Instead, I concentrated on the sensation of pushing them: the feel of their warm backs under my hands for just a moment, then pushing them away, watching their hair flip upward in the wind.

Then, just as it does during the meditation portion of yoga class, my mind started to wander. Several times I brought it back to the present moment, the wind, the sun, the buoyant laughter of children, blahblahblah…but finally, the gentle bling of my cell phone downloading e-mail was my undoing: I pulled it out of my pocket, saw a few interesting subject lines, and started reading. After five minutes or so, I gave my kids the five-minute warning, and pretty soon we were headed home.

Did I fail or did I succeed? Both, I guess. I failed at being a completely present, completely engaged parent for a sustained period of time (is that even possible most of the time?). But I succeeded at not hating the playground for 20 minutes. My kids were happy, I’d given my brain a little break, and I’d even sort of enjoyed myself. I call that a success.

I’m going to try this exercise again next time I’m doing something I don’t really want to do. Really engaging in whatever it is I’m doing, focusing just on the experience of the task at hand instead of thinking about what I wish I were doing instead or how annoyed I am that I have to be doing it in the first place, seems to remove the psychological baggage associated with our least-favorite tasks. Sometimes, I think we hate things because we convince ourselves we hate them–maybe what we need is a little mental re-training. Heck, maybe I can even teach myself to like vacuuming.

If you could choose one task (parenting or otherwise) to treat as a “meditation lesson”, what would it be?