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Josh Misner, PhD

Mindful Living in a Distracted World

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The Gift of Presence

Day 1 – Movie Night


Full bed-fort, with a mattress base, stuffed animal moat, topped with six blankets?  Check.

Buttery popcorn? Check.

Gummy cola bottles, Dots, and Cookies-and-Cream Hershey bar?  Check.

Batman Snuggie?  Check.

A Christmas Story in the blu-ray player with the surround sound cranked up?  Check.

We had all the makings of the perfect family movie night.  We watched, or rather they watched the movie, while I watched them.  Wide-eyed with just-cracked smiles the whole time, we laughed aloud at all the very same parts of the movie that I laughed at when I was their ages.  They told me that the dad in the movie reminded them of me, when I was installing a dishwasher, a dryer, or yes, even working on the furnace that always seems to act up in the wintertime. Continue reading “Day 1 – Movie Night” →

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Let it be me

 A “post-poem” for my children…
 


Let it be me

 

When you find a roly-poly under a rock, whose feet tickle the palms of your hands and make you squeal with delight, and your excitement to show another living soul simply cannot be contained a second longer…

Let it be me.

Not a dad who is too busy.
Not a dad who has one more email to answer.
Not a dad with the uninterruptible daily routine.

When your math homework gives you a headache so bad that it makes you want to break your #2 pencil in two, wad up your homework sheet, and throw it across the room, and you need someone to talk you down…

Let it be me.

Not a man who doesn’t know the first thing about Euclidean proofs.
Not a man who lacks just enough compassion to realize that struggling only does so much good.
Not a man with the missing satellite remote and an insufferable commercial break.

When your boyfriend does something so unspeakable that it shatters your faith in love or your girlfriend rips out your soul, leaving you an empty shell, but in either case, all you need is a set of familiar arms to hold you, rock you back & forth, and remind you that life can & will go on…

Let it be me.

Not a father who has let life harden him to the core.
Not a father who has suffered and wants others to suffer, too.
Not a father harboring jealousy for your trusting nature.

When the world comes shouting, berating, minimizing, and scolding, beating back your will with subjugating castigation to the point where you no longer believe in the power of your dreams, and all you want is someone to make you feel meaningful again…

Let it be me.

Not someone who never recovered from burnout.
Not someone who was never told it couldn’t be done.
Not someone who couldn’t stare the world back when it did the same to him.

Whatever it is you need from life, my loves…

Please.

Let it be me.


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Two little sentences


Not a full-on post, but an important note, nonetheless…
Today, I had the pleasure of spending most of the day with my youngest, who just turned six on Friday. We didn’t do anything I would consider all that consequential – jumped on the trampoline, watched “World’s Deadliest Spiders” three times, pretended we were spiders on the trampoline, and then hunted for spiders in the yard.

At the end of the day, as we reclined on the sofa together, watching the creepy arachnid special just one more time, he snuggled his head into the base of my neck and uttered two sentences that utterly floored me:

“You’re the best daddy I could ever ask for. I love spending time with you.”

It wasn’t what we spent time doing together; it was how we spent it and that we were doing it as a team.

Mindfulness requires us to want to be present. Wanting to be present, even when there is something that seems more pressing, is not easy, but can be attained with practice.

The payoff for this mindful presence is impressive, and that one little moment is enough to brink a smile to even the darkest day for me.

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Little, soon forgotten charities

 
“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions – the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge


I’ve caught myself on quite a few occasions overdoing my role as a parent.  I’ve often thought about the fact that I want to give my children the world, wrapped up in an Amazon.com box and tie it off with a pretty pink bow.  

Several years back, my youngest daughter fell in love with a gilded toy carousel she saw on the Christmas shelf at a local store, so what did I do?  I went back later and bought it for her, despite the $100 price tag, and later on, I surprised her with it, relishing in the shock on her face and the subsequent death-grip hug I soon found myself in.  I was on top of the world.  My wallet had brought my daughter boundless and unconditional happiness.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened next. Continue reading “Little, soon forgotten charities” →

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Being the mindful parents our children deserve

According to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, the number of single-parent homes has tripled in the last three decades.  When people think of “single parents,” they automatically picture a single mother, but according to Single Parent Magazine, the number of single fathers has risen to over 2 million in the last decade alone, an increase of more than 60%.  Because of these increasing demographics, study after study has been done on the impact of the absent parent. 

Problem is, most of these focus on absent fathers.

What the research has shown is that children with absent fathers are:

  • 5 times more likely to be in poverty
  • At greater risk for drug abuse as teenagers
  • More likely to experience severe psychological distress

What the research does not show, however, is what happens when a parent is absent in the mental sense of the term… Continue reading “Being the mindful parents our children deserve” →

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Why Saturdays?

Setting & Keeping a Technology-Free Day

Every semester, at the beginning, as I am painfully explaining the details of my syllabus to classes filled with impatient students, I eventually get to talking about my contact information and office hours.  See, while I keep regular face-to-face office hours as all instructors are required to, I am also notoriously OCD about responding to emails.

When I first started teaching, I would check my computer multiple times each hour, seeing if there was a new message waiting for me.  Psychologists would likely suggest that I had been socialized to do this in a similar fashion to Skinner’s mouse, who was trained to push down on a lever with the same obsessive frequency because once, just once in a while, that lever push would reward the mouse with a yummy treat.  I don’t mean to suggest that I was receiving any tangible compensation for checking and responding to student emails so frequently, but what I was getting was the interaction I craved. Continue reading “Why Saturdays?” →

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