by Ray Jolicoeur, founder of renoo meditation goods, and meditation instructor.
Summer is almost here.
And with it comes something we rarely allow ourselves to fully receive: time.
Not time to be more productive. Not time to catch up. Just time. Open. Unscheduled. Empty in the best possible way. The kind of time you had as a kid — when a whole afternoon could be spent doing nothing, and somehow that felt like everything.
That quality of presence — nowhere to go, nothing to do — might be the deepest practice of all.
The art of renoo-ing
The word renoo is a play on "renew." And renewal isn't something you manufacture. You can't hustle your way into it. It happens when you get out of the way and let life in.
Children understand this naturally. They aren't practicing mindfulness. They're just alive — fully, and without apology — in whatever is happening right now. The mud puddle. The merry-go-round. The ice cream dripping faster than they can lick it. There is no gap between them and the experience. They are the experience.
We lose this somewhere along the way. We learn to manage. To monitor. To stay in control.
And then we go to a meditation class to find it again.
But what if summer gave us a shortcut?
A spinning top at Little Island
I was out for a run with Mary, my partner, along the west side earlier this week. No agenda. Just moving. We ended up at Little Island — that remarkable floating park on the Hudson — early enough that the light was still soft and the city felt like it was just waking up.
There was a spinning top chair there. Low to the ground. Round base. Shaped exactly like a top. Designed to spin. What happened next was entirely on me.
I sat in it. I gave myself a spin or two. And almost immediately, something opened up. I could feel the shift in weight, the change in orientation. I noticed my thoughts moving with the motion. There was a sense of awe about the whole dynamics of it — this simple chair, this simple spin, this wonderful moment. And then I felt myself tipping. I saw it coming. Almost welcomed it, having tested the limits, still joyful, still appreciative. My elbow hit the ground. Boom. More laughs. A bit of blood. The park rangers kindly appeared with bandaids, asking if I was old enough to use these. I said, laughing, probably not.
Being mindful to be unmindful
Here's the paradox. Sometimes being mindful means being fully present for your own unmindfulness. Presence isn't only sitting still in a quiet room, following your breath. Sometimes it means being completely available for the ridiculous. The spontaneous. The childlike.
Mid-spin, I wasn't trying to be present. I was just in it — the sensation of movement, the slight vertigo, the joy of not being in charge of what came next. That is presence. That is the thing we're always trying to remember.
This is the summer invitation: let yourself play. Not as a reward for finishing your to-do list. Just play — because something catches your eye and your body says yes before your brain has a chance to say wait. Sit on a bench a little longer than feels necessary. Eat the ice cream slow. Find the spinning top. Let yourself be six years old again, even just for thirty seconds.
Scratched elbows heal. The memory of pure, uncalculated joy tends to stay.
What would it mean to renoo your summer — not by doing more, but by finally, fully, arriving?
Photo credit: Mary Chua — Little Island, NYC
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