In November, an article did the rounds—entitled “Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment”—in which the author describes, hilariously, a failed attempt at mindful dishwashing.

It’s quite relatable if you’ve ever tried to force yourself to “be with” some unpleasant domestic task like sorting recycling or scrubbing a drip tray. Even if you’re attracted to the idea of mindfulness, actually trying to commune with tedious or objectionable experiences often proves to be neither enlightening nor fulfilling.

The piece is mostly an exasperated rebuttal to the New Age tenet that we should force ourselves to “live in the moment”. It’s an understandable rant, and I think it represents an increasingly common sentiment in the self-improvement world: mindfulness is annoying.

At least, it’s annoying to try to be mindful all the time, and it’s annoying to be told to be mindful all the time. I receive emails expressing similar frustrations, from people who are tired of trying to find peace in the folding of laundry or the raking of litterboxes, even if they still believe it is somehow possible.

As the author, Ruth Whippman writes, “Mindfulness is supposed to be a defense against the pressures of modern life, but it’s starting to feel suspiciously like it’s adding to them.”  Read More

The antibiotics didn’t work, so next I’m going to try doing the dishes.

The illness I referred to in my last post two weeks ago — the one that I said has been impeding my consciousness, shrinking my world down to its most selfish and short-sighted concerns — is still going strong even after taking the whole course of pills prescribed by the doctor. It’s been almost a month altogether.

If it doesn’t get better in a few days I will consult modern medicine again, but in the mean time I’m going to start treating the symptoms in my own way. The coughing and fatigue are annoying, but by far the worst effect of this bout of sickness is that I’ve become a lot more reactive and stressed than normal, which I described in the last article as being stuck in the “lower latitudes” of the overall human spectrum of consciousness.

This lowered consciousness causes all kinds of secondary side-effects. I’m less patient about cleaning up properly, which leads to house-clutter, which in turn creates more mental clutter. I haven’t been especially pleasant to be around, which leads to a correspondingly ill social life, and a growing feeling of missing out. The mental fog makes writing a lot more difficult, and being more reactive means I’m quicker to throw out ideas before I give them a chance to develop. Together, these side-effects create an exaggerated sense that my life and all its little duties are beyond my current capacity to meet.

I normally derive a lot of my sense of stability and peace from the habit of mindfulness — the way in which I walk across parking lots and make tea — and since I’ve been sick it has not been very appealing. I tend to want all the normal moments to be over, or to not happen at all.

A month is a long time to be in such an impaired state and I’m alarmed at how far I’ve fallen in that respect. It’s normally very easy for me to just let my attention settle on an ordinary moment, and find that it reflects some peace or beauty back to me. But right now it only takes a few seconds before something annoys me: the pain in my chest, or the weird clamminess I have, or how it is almost mid-April and still freezing.

If my compromised physical state has created a compromised mental state, then I suppose that treating my current mental state is only going to improve my physical state. It certainly can’t hurt. I need a single, regular place to apply deliberate mindfulness every day.

Signs have been pointing to my sink. My mother’s dishwasher broke months ago, and she never bothered to fix it, because doing them by hand was almost as easy and nothing about it can break down. Read More

On Twitter the other day someone asked why he should continue to experiment with mindfulness meditation — specifically, what does it do for you when you’re not meditating?

Others and I gave the usual replies: you don’t get stuck in rumination as easily, you better appreciate the ordinary sensations that make up life, and it helps you suffer less over your pains and get less addicted to your pleasures. It seems to shift your natural inclination towards healthy behaviors, and away from unhealthy/self-defeating behaviors.

However, saying all that doesn’t clarify why mindfulness meditation might do those things. Does closely observing the flow of your experience just make you a better person somehow?

I would say… yes, probably. A wiser person, at least. Meditation makes you wise, and wisdom makes better ways of living feel more natural, and worse ways feel less natural.

But how? Reflecting later on how my response didn’t answer the poster’s real question, I thought of an analogy that might do a better job.

In biology class, you learn that every life form adopts a niche: a little role in some corner of the ecosystem, where it earns its daily bread by doing a rather specific thing.    

For example, the dung beetle collects animal poo, presumably because nobody else was already doing that, then rolls it into balls and lays its eggs inside of them, giving its larvae a handy source of nutrients.

The beaver gnaws at trees until they fall over, then drags the logs into piles. These piles dam streams and rivers, creating artificial ponds, which hide the beavers from predators and expand their access to food.

Squirrels, being better climbers than mice, once fed themselves by collecting seeds from hard-to-reach branches, and now specialize in stealing cherry tomatoes from my garden.

In blogging school, you learn the same principle: every little blog trying to make its way in the vast content ocean must establish itself in a niche. It needs to stake out a little corner of the action, a little field it can work, so to speak.

Thousands of books have been written attempting to point people to the difference between mindfulness and “paying attention” as we normally do. I’ve read a lot of these books, and even written a few.

There are simpler ways to get at the concept though.

If you want to grasp what is usually meant by the word mindfulness*, all you need to do is to find the answer to a simple question: how does the room sound right now?

By “the room” I really just mean wherever you are. You could be in a room, or outside, or in a stadium, in a cave, scuba diving among coral reefs, whatever. The point is there’s always something to hear, wherever you are.

If you wanted to know how the room sounds, how would you get the answer to that question?

Well, you’d listen to it.

Try it now. Find out how the room sounds. Take a good twenty seconds to inquire, by listening.

. . .

So how does it sound?

You might say, “Well I hear the laptop fan whirring, I hear a large vehicle rumbling around out there, maybe a garbage truck. There are some distant voices, and also some pigeons warbling out on the eavestrough. I can even hear my breath escaping my nose at times.”

I appreciate Sam Harris’s apt analogy about inner monologues — being caught up in your own thinking is like having been kidnapped and held hostage by the most boring person on earth. You’re forced to listen, as though at gunpoint, to an internal commentator who insists on telling you its impressions of everything it notices or thinks about.

Nothing is too petty, too repetitive, or too obvious for the boring kidnapper’s ongoing monologue: Susan was wrong to criticize people who wear Crocs to the grocery store; a certain politician is the worst person alive and here’s why; your ex-partner was definitely out of line when he accused you of wasting dish detergent that time; the two halves of this Oreo don’t line up, but it would be so much nicer if they did.

If you’re ever able to step back from your own mental chatter, and listen to it with some critical distance, perhaps after a long meditation, or in one of those tired but insightful moments near the end of the day, you might find it indeed exhibits many of the characteristics of an extremely boring and self-absorbed person. It’s not that you yourself are this way — surely you don’t say everything that comes to mind. But the mind does.