On Mindfulness

On Mindfulness

Just now as I walked up the hill, I had an inner struggle. Last night I read Thich Nhat’s How to Walk. It was all about being in the here and now, being present with every step, feeling the earth under your soles. Thich seemed to condemn the type of walking multi-tasking that I and so many of my peers employ almost constantly. I read his words, and I believe him: people often get less joy out of daily activities and general life because they are constantly criticizing/analyzing the past or worrying of the future. I do believe that my generation may be more disconnected to the now, the present moment, than any generation before, thanks to the complexity of modern life and the world of technology at our fingertips. But I just don’t know if this is all bad.

I wish I could ask some of the great writers: “Did you think about what you would write while you walked to the grocery store? When you walked along the shore of that great body of water, did you consider it actively, passively, or not at all? Did you simply walk, breathe, and look, or were you interacting with your sense data, marveling at the sunset, the sound of the surf, and the warm sand under foot?” I feel like their answers could vary person to person, or even moment to moment. It seems right to me that some moments one should lose themselves in the lapping of blue or in digging their toes into the earth; but it also seems that the writer and the storyteller must at times pull themselves from the waves and the sand, and think about what the salty smell does to their parched lips, how the rhythmic crash of rolling thunder plays with eardrum to put one to sleep, or how the curl of toes buried in gold can make one feel so grounded amidst life’s turmoil. But maybe the time for reflection is after the fact.

Maybe Thich is not advocating for the end of reflection, but more trying to clarify our intent in each moment; for when we pull ourselves from the sand to contemplate its solid hold on our soles, we are missing some of the strength in that grip. Some of the nuances are lost in translation when our head tries to spin a single strand of words from a sea of sensation; to look at the ocean, get a different perspective on it, we must necessarily pull our head from the waters, but then we are no longer submerged.

So maybe walks on the shore should be reserved for immersion and then, once one finds themselves sitting before a blank page, or speaking to an audience, only then should one conjure the feelings and sensations from the murky depths of memory and try to paint a picture of experience with words.

#books #reflections #continuingthought