What I Learned About Myself at the Grocery Store: Mindfulness Lessons from COVID-19

30 Mar 2020

What I Learned About Myself at the Grocery Store:

Mindfulness Lessons from COVID-19

By: Elaine Smookler, March 20, 2020

Elaine Smookler didn't expect to find herself fighting the urge to panic-buy while shopping this week. Here's how mindfulness helped her to slow down and remember kindness.

I could see the last bag of 2% milk lying on its side, still untouched in the supermarket dairy section. I tried to stay calm as I motored quietly towards it, hoping no one else had noticed. I moved my eye-line so it would look like I was perhaps interested in chocolate milk, or maybe skim—there was still lots of that. The pandemic was upon us, and I wasn’t going to make it without 2% milk!

A dear mindfulness colleague called me an hour before that moment in the grocery store, with urgency in her tone. “Have you gone shopping? You have to go shopping, right now, I’m not kidding. We are all about to go on lockdown, go get food right now!” My colleague is a doctor, her husband is a doctor, I thought they would be the first ones to laugh this whole thing off as some kind of social media mind-madness. 

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