Listening to the Call of the Little

Listening to the Call of the Little by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Mar 2013 

     The tables have turned. For the past month I’ve been the one on the couch, as it were.  I’ve seen my clients, and they have seen me, from the perspective of me half lying on the sofa in my living room, rather than the more professional space downstairs.  I think we have liked this turnaround a bit. I know the shift in my position has made the relationship that I share in this therapeutic space much more horizontal (excuse the pun) and quite useful overall. 

     I’ve been ill and uncomfortable in my body this last month. I’m healing, though, and with my growing strength I am appreciating the subtleties of small things. 

      In deprivation of a capacity to perform big dramatic acts, when “doing” something has actually been difficult and time consuming, when you have to think about its completion a long time before actually getting down to doing it, then you have to deal with exactly what is at hand. I am somewhat slow to appreciate this, and yet in coming to know it in my own bones I also get a better sense of the value of  being gentle with time, of being patient with very little. I am realizing in myself what I’ve said to others, that it is in incremental shifts that brings change of an enduring kind, not the big sudden changes that perhaps we all hope for.

      There is a walking meditation I like to do, and which sometimes I suggest my clients do, that consists of nothing more than bringing focal awareness to the act of walking slowly. Each foot carefully placed on the ground, rocking this way and that, of finding the centre point, of rolling and twisting slightly, of regaining equilibrium, and the urge to place the other foot down, and slowly lifting the first foot, and feeling the shift in balance, and so on, brings challenge to something usually taken for granted. The mindfulness achieved in this meditation can be expanded to every other act a person might engage in, in the course of her life.  Nothing ever needs to feels as though it just happens; that things are being done to oneself that one has not agreed to. The act of mindfulness restores a sense of agency as well as an awareness of the interconnectedness, and rhythm, of all things.

     Each movement in this walking meditation brings to awareness its reliance upon all that has gone before and what is about to be achieved next. Without this proper consideration you are liable to fall.

In the rhythm of nature there is a flux and flow and a counterpoint to big acts are the gentler small ones. It’s when we try to do the big stuff, without balancing it with the little bits, that we come unstuck. I realize that my recent illness was probably promoted by my lack of listening to the call of the little, for I was caught up in the grand designs of life-changing restructuring, of new directions planned for but confined to tight pieces of time. I have been like an actor trying to perform Cats, playing all the parts, on a stage the size of a shoebox.

     It is in the attention to the little that, paradoxically, a sense of expansiveness arises; a timelessness that emerges from the concentration upon the minutiae of attending to the little things in this small moment.

     It is in this attention to the small ordinary acts of everyday life that healing takes place. The poisonous excesses of big acts unrelieved by gentleness literally do poison the soul, and the body (in my case). So after the big stuff, I urge you to enjoy the small, to savour every drop of its sweetness, its ordinariness, and delight in not what this little piece of life can bring to you, but what inventiveness and creativity you can deliver into this small space of gentle – and exceptional – littleness.  Therein lies healing  for us wounded ones, therapist and client alike.

 Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell