Notice You’re Alive More Often Than Never
Training your attention doesn’t solve your problems. It builds capacity for responding to whatever life brings.
Mindfulness practice doesn’t fix anything. It changes how I relate to everything. Not how I think about things, but my capacity to respond to moments without constantly micromanaging them as they unfold.
I’m not smarter, wiser, or more productive than before. I don’t feel more spiritual. But I’m more aware now when there’s less internal friction that I hadn’t realized was there until it started to erode.
I don’t notice this difference all the time, but when I do, I experience whatever is happening more fully. Pleasant moments feel richer. Unpleasant moments feel less personal.
What thins out is the tendency to automatically reject what’s happening or try to improve it—the thing that makes uncomfortable moments worse and stifles the life out of comfortable ones.
How do you set the stage for this kind of internal erosion? By prioritizing sensing directly over making sense more often than never.
Notice what it’s like to see what’s in front of your eyes. Hear a sound for a handful of seconds. Redirect your awareness toward a physical or emotional sensation — whether comfortable or not. Let the impulse to make sense ride in the backseat for a bit.
This shift isn’t difficult. It can seem so effortless as to be pointless — like doing a single push-up. One repetition is easy, and the urge to make sense prefers driving. But the impact of regular exercise is the opposite of trivial.
Exercising your attention a few times a week is difficult. But just as push-ups build muscle, collecting repetitions of sensing directly over making sense will change how you relate to your life.
It’s been a relief to discover mindfulness doesn’t solve my problems. It takes the pressure off. The same with physical exercise — knowing I’ll never be a professional athlete allows me to exercise for the intrinsic benefits.
Developing attentional fitness has equipped me to navigate the steady stream of life's challenges. At a visceral level, it confirmed something Joseph Campbell said: “I think that what we’re seeking is an experience…the rapture of being alive.”
Daron - Thank you for sharing this important piece of writing on mindfulness. You capture the essence of something - being mindful of an internal experience - and lay out how you think about it and relay verbally how you relate to it and how it changes your experience but do so in regard to something lessening. You capture the complexity of being mindgful both in regard to what it expands within your experience but also what it takes away from you in a way you prefer.
This complexity is not always the easiest to explain in words. I appreciate you doing so. Well done!
This was so helpful, Daron, at a time when I'm asking "why?" of a million different things in the world.