Six Minutes of Mindfulness
A short story about paying attention
Janet did everything right in order to get into heaven, so she’s not at all surprised to arrive here. But when she walked in, we angels glance at each other, faces grim.
She sensed something was wrong. “What’s going on?”
We’d been whispering for weeks about Janet. Sammy had won a bet when he predicted we’d get one under ten minutes.
“Humans are idiots,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a null file someday.”
We drew straws on who had to greet her and break the news. I lost.
As we waited for her at the pearly gates, I’d reviewed her file. She’d done things “right,” adhered to the commandments, not that that counts for much anymore. Even the Golden Rule has been re-written: “Do unto others what they would want done unto them.”
Problem is, we haven’t come up with a way to deliver this update down to earth. Jesus talked about going back, getting a twitter, and delivering the message himself, but a second coming has implications that we haven’t worked out, how to assure people there’d be a third time he’d appear, and that that would be the one to worry about, the one where Jesus gets to be all judge-y.
But he’s increasingly uncomfortable with that notion, too, so there’s a committee called “2nd Times the Charm,” I think, or maybe: “2nd Time He’s Charming,” they meet on Tuesday nights to party plan a softer, gentler, second coming. Or third. In the meantime, people are doing unto others things that cause pain and confusion when personal tastes diverge, often in the name of God, which irritates Him to no end. It’s one of our hot ticket items.
Anyway, Janet had been great in life, raised a son, was kind, tried to do good work and help others. But despite the notion that being in heaven was perfect bliss, I had to deliver some bad news.
“Well, normally, when you get to heaven, you spend time reviewing your life. For all the moments one really pays attention, drinking in what it feels like to be alive, in a body, on the earth, enjoying or not enjoying an experience, that moment is recorded and saved, waiting for you to review, enjoy, or re-experience. In Heaven, like a film. You can watch the highs, of course, and relive the enjoyment, but the lows too, you can really have a good cry at them, it’s cathartic.”
“That sounds great!” she said, proud of her time on earth. “How do I get started?”
“Um, there’s a problem with your life.”
“What do you mean? I lived a great life!”
“Well, you only get to review the portions of your life that you lived mindfully. When you really paid attention. Otherwise it’s not recorded. And you… only have six minutes of film.”
“That must be a mistake,” she said.
“No. We don’t make mistakes in heaven. You weren’t paying attention to your life. You were rushing through, always thinking about what’s next. You were striving for the next thing that you wanted, and you were hardly ever really present in the moment.”
Others who had had a poor record of mindfulness on earth pleaded for more time, more life to review, as if it was a God-given right that they get everything they want in Heaven. They don’t. God didn’t care, they had infinite lifetimes, infinite chances to go back and get it right.
But that didn’t change the fact that the newly dead, after acclimating to the fact that they were, in fact, dead, would argue to death for their right to examine and re-enjoy all the moments of their life on earth.
Janet was no exception, she was pissed. Others who arrived with her were busy for days, weeks, months, even. She wandered around, peeking in on their films, seeing vacations, sex scenes, work accomplishments. She vicariously experienced earthly joy and sorrow through them, but it fell flat, she wanted to revive her own emotions.
God didn’t have any interest in recording every moment of everyone’s life. Aside from the storage nightmare that would have presented, (which is not a thing, God’s resources are infinite, but he always brought that up first like it mattered), he didn’t think you had any business re-experiencing a moment you didn’t have enough interest in to pay attention to the first time it swung by your soul. He had no sympathy, and did not waiver. He was punitive and cranky like that sometimes. Jesus called it his “First Testament Mood.” He and Buddha often ribbed him about it.
Janet’s film, which we all watched (before she arrived, of course, because we wanted to make fun of it and that wouldn’t have been kind, never mind heavenly), was a collection of odd moments of her life. Half of it was from childhood, as most children (except Janet, it turns out), are pretty much in the moment. There was a few minutes of her holding a cat in her lap, a few minutes of cloud watching. But most of her childhood, she told us later, was spent anxiously waiting for her drunk father to re-appear, finding spots to hide in, and worrying what would happen when he found her.
There was a moment where she had her hand out a car window, and waived it up and down, riding the wind out the window. There was a moment or two of mindful eating, because she liked food and cooking.
What she wanted, and what she whined and cried for, was a few moments of holding her son, her only child. She’d gone by other people’s viewing rooms and saw other mothers attentively staring into the eyes of the baby they were feeding, and she remembered she’d nursed her baby, and felt cheated. She was so jealous.
“Why can’t I see my baby?” she pleaded.
“Well…” I said, trying to be diplomatic, “you were distracted.”
“But I nursed him for 9 months!”
“I’m sorry.” I mumbled. I did have sympathy for her.
“You should let people know!” she cried and ran away.
She studied her six minutes over and over, sometimes on slow motion, maybe hoping there was some glitch and she’d catch a glimpse of something more, see her baby for microsecond and pause on him. But she had spent the minutes nursing her child watching home shopping channels or soap operas, calling her sister to complain about the baby not sleeping, constantly on the phone. Then she would move on to housecleaning and cooking, instead of mindfully watching him as he dozed off.
She didn’t let it go. Janet got so mad she told me she wanted to file a complaint with God.
“That’s… not done! It’s God. He doesn’t take complaints,” I said.
But she persisted and I inquired for her. And she got a hearing! I was allowed to accompany her. Which was great, though God is everywhere and everything, standing in his actual presence is a pretty good feeling.
Not so for Janet, I guess, because she strode angrily into the room, a hot knife through the butter of the peace and bliss he emanated. I hurried to catch up to her.
“Six freaking minutes?” she yelled, a lifetime habit of being too good to cuss. But then, “God dammit!” she said, and looked at God to see his reaction to using his name in vain. He didn’t even flinch. The Commandments were so several centuries ago. Like I said, his pressing issues were getting people to treat each other well and with empathy. And he was really focused on this mindfulness issue, annoyed that people were wasting their time on earth, not savoring the experience, this God-gift he felt they weren’t properly appreciating.
“What were you thinking? It’s not fair! What am I supposed to do now? I want to see more of my life!”
“Nah, you don’t want to do that,” says God.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“An unexamined life is not worth watching.”
She paused, remembering. It was a little wearying just to remember how she never could quite catch up. Maybe God’s peace was getting to her because she sighed and said,
“Well. What now?”
“You can enjoy the all-you-can-eat sundae bar,” He said.
“Ugh.”
“Or you can go back. Have another go at it.”
It was by no means assured she’d do better. There was no planning of the curricula. I was surprised myself that there wasn’t some method to it, a progression of experience or training. But instead, it was random, like God had all the time in the world for you to make mistake after mistake. You were either a person who was mindful, or not. I explained this to Janet, in case she wanted to just hang out in Heaven for a while, relax a little. I mean, after the life she’d had, especially that childhood, she deserved a little rest.
“You won’t remember your time in Heaven,” I warned.
But Janet was determined. She left almost immediately.
And I’m happy to report that the next time she was back in heaven, there were months of tapes. And though it had been a lifetime, because heaven is eternal, it seemed like just a moment before Janet was back.
She knew she had something good this time, and invited us to watch it.
“It’s not all happy,” she said. “But I experienced every minute of it.”
Because this time, the enlightenment, the awareness, hit her early. So she savored the time in the arms of her lover, felt the skin to skin contact with every cell. Stroked the head of her newborn, smelled the lavender in the soap as she washed her hands. Other good stuff, too: sunrises and sunsets sought out and watched for long minutes, several babies nursing and sleeping, friends and parties, music, (oh, weren’t we happy to hear the music with her), walks through the woods. Mindful gratitude for any attention given to her by her husband or friends. Flowers pressed into books, memories written into journals. Breathing, feeling emotions, exercise and the feeling of having skin and muscle and emotion and senses. Feeling the breeze, smelling the air, touching the bark.
At one point as we watched her movie with her, Janet is mindfully noticing the smell of skunk and right at that point God walked into the room and snorts, and stays to makes fun of her for a minute. She was undaunted, and went back to watching her life unfold on the screen, her face beaming with happiness. God slipped out, looking pretty satisfied himself.
In her life she pushed for more opportunities to be mindful. Instead of wallpapering the front hall, she went waltzing. And when her partner swooped her up in his arms and twirled her around the floor in the old hall to the music of a fiddle and piano player, she was recording every second of it. She smiled way more in this life, and had fewer wrinkles. She cried more easily too, but sat with it, turned towards it, breathed through it. That was recorded too. Everything was just…enough.
Lots of people were jealous of the way she lived this time, peeked in when she was watching her film, and smiled or cried along with her. She was a star this time. A hero to those of us who stay in heaven, and miss earthly experiences. We thanked her for bringing them to us.
During that life Janet discovered that Heaven was on earth (and vice versa). She stopped trying so hard at the entry requirements, those commandments, and sunk deeply into the heaven she could find on earth, mindfully experiencing it minute by minute.
