Once upon a time, I mediated by accident. It wasn’t a total surprise. I had, after all, been listening to a free lecture by Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness entitled “A More Mindful Society Might Depend on Us: Embodying Our Beauty and Our Wholeness in Our Live and in the World.” If ever a lecture to a packed room of interested listeners had an action item, it’d be that one!

My two companions and I helpfully held up the wall at the rear of the Lesley University lecture hall, where we’d sneaked in. We enjoyed a view of backs-of-heads nodding agreement, rueful smiles shared with nearby companions, hands dashing down notes. After describing mindfulness as a radical, world-altering force, Mr. Kabat-Zinn invited us to join him in a short exercise to be here now.

I shut my eyes and felt the force of the room, the solidarity, the respect for process and humanity, for ourselves. I followed my breath, marveling at the whirling of my seemingly un-containable thoughts, and enjoyed a secret with myself: this exercise was a surprise check-mark on my 101 Things in 1001 Days goal of “meditate for five minutes a day for fifteen days.”

Sweet.

Many thanks to my friend Sage Radachowsky for the photo.