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Mindful of the Black Ice
Focus can help us identify and melt our personal black ice.
Tonight on the local evening news in the cold northeast, the weatherman warned the audience three times to “be mindful of black ice while driving home.” It had rained in the early afternoon, then turned cold. A perfect recipe for bad accidents. Black ice is actually not black but clear, almost invisible. Hearing the weatherman say mindful three times made me stop and take note. I’ve been studying mindfulness for a long time and writing about it more recently.
Mindfulness can be described as having clear, undistorted awareness of what is happening outside as well as inside ourselves.
The weatherman was reminding his viewers to focus our mindfulness on something specific and in this case, in order to prevent disaster.
Imagine you are driving home after work on a two lane road in the dark. It’s mid-December at 4:45 pm, and the clocks have long-since turned back, so it’s pitch black already. Your hands grip the wheel tightly. It’s stressful and feels difficult. You’d find, if you noticed, that you were probably holding your breath. You are completely focused on what you are doing, and driving a safe speed, but as you come around a long turn to the right, in the shade of some tall trees, you hit a patch of black ice and slide out of control, facing the wrong way, into…
