Spiritual Practices for the Grocery Store

 I had just returned from a retreat, and was feeling very peaceful and centered. Then I went to the grocery store during that crowded time of the week when everyone seems to be at the grocery store. Almost immediately I felt impatient. It seemed like everyone was getting in my way- blocking aisles with badly positioned carts or bodies. It’s not uncommon for me to feel grumpy and impatient at the grocery store, but on this occasion, perhaps because I had just come from a retreat, it occurred to me to wonder “why the impatience?” I didn’t, in point of fact, have any place else I needed to be. I had plenty of time to buy my groceries, get home and cook dinner. If I totaled up each time I had to stop and wait for folks to move, it couldn’t possibly add more than 5 minutes, so where was the harm?

I noticed that I was seeing all these people at the store as obstacles to my goal. They were not fellow shoppers, they were objects in my way. I was humbled by the realization.

Two habits of mind contributed to this perception. First, the idea that time spent in the grocery story is wasted, is taking away from my “real life” which can only continue once I get home. From this point of view, any additional moment I spent waiting for the cross traffic of lumbering grocery carts was perceived as taking away from “my time.” But I know this is not the case- my life in the grocery store is still my life. I get to choose whether I spend that time mindfully or whether I treat it as “waste time” that I discard. My dad used to say, once he had us kids loaded in the car for any outing, whether to the bank, the grocery store or the gas station “We’re off—on the greatest adventure of our lives!” This inevitably caused us to groan and roll our eyes. But I wonder; how would my time in the grocery story be different if I thought of it as a great adventure, instead of a waste?

The second habit I noticed was seeing obstacles instead of people. Each and every person in the grocery store is having their own troubles, their own adventures, their own feelings about being stuck in the produce aisle. No person is an object. I asked myself, “how would my visit to the grocery store change if I challenged myself to think of all these people as souls”? It was harder than I thought. I could do the things I would do if I saw them as souls, like slowing down, and being patient and letting other people go first, but it was hard to really feel that they were souls. Perhaps it’s because when we go out shopping, we ourselves act like objects, not souls. We put our protective coating on, and our souls barely leek out. It helped when I started making up stories about my fellow shoppers: “she looks like she had a hard day at work” or “perhaps the man in line at the prescription counter has just gotten some bad news from his doctor.” It also helped to look at people, to really notice them: “look how patient that woman is being with her 2 young children.” Or “look how hard that cashier is working to get people through her line quickly.”

I’ve decided to make this my new spiritual practice everywhere I go, but especially those places where everyone seems like an obstacle or an object: like in traffic, like at the store. What would it take to see the people around me souls? And what difference might it make to my own spirit, and to the spaces we share?

Waiting in line to vote- "The Greatest Adventure of our Lives"