Mindfulness

Over the past few years I’ve become more appreciative of the power of mindfulness. Many of us are used to hearing that term in the context of “mindfulness meditation,” but the practice of mindfulness isn’t limited to meditating. In fact, although I meditated daily for several weeks a few years ago, I didn’t stick with it.

But I have stuck with the practice of being mindful. For example, I’ve noticed that there are certain things I need to do that I resist doing. Some errands can feel burdensome, as can household chores. But I’ve discovered only in the last couple of years that if I get really present to what I’m doing, give it my full attention and notice how I feel about it and what thoughts I have about it, the experience of drudgery disappears. It’s like a mental game, and there are different ways to play it:

• What would it be like to focus every bit of my attention on this task and be fully present to what I’m experiencing in every moment of doing it?

or

• What would happen if I did this task as precisely and thoughtfully as it’s ever been done?

Practicing mindfulness is almost like having a superpower: the ability to make tedium and boredom disappear.

Almost all of us spend at least part of our time trying to get whatever we’re doing over with so we can move on to the next thing. A sense of impatience permeates much of what we spend our time on — all those routine, unexceptional, necessary activities that take up a significant portion of each day.

Ray Bradbury once asked us to imagine that, millennia after we had died, consigned to an eternity of nothingness, God awakened us and gave us an opportunity to relive an hour of our life, and asked us which hour we would choose. He suggested that we would likely say, “Any hour! Any blessed hour of my whole blessed life!”

We don’t live every moment of our life as if it’s a precious gift, that our time on this earth is a brief interlude, preceded and followed by an eternity of not being here. How might it feel to be on our deathbed, looking forward into an infinite abyss of non-existence, and realize that we spent much of our life resisting it, impatiently rushing to get through it? I don’t know about you, but I’d feel pretty stupid.

People who have survived a deadly disease or had a near-death experience, are — for a while, at least — present to the precious gift that life is. For the rest of us, it’s impossible not to be complacent, at least to some extent, about being alive. Mindfulness is a way of asserting that this moment, whatever I’m doing right now, is my one and only life, that I’ll never have this moment back, and that not too long from now, there will be no more moments at all.