Brave New Kitty

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-William Wordsworth

If Wordsworth had caught a glimpse of the modern world, with its television, Internet, cell phones, and all its other insistent attention-grabbers, he probably would have given up on our species on the spot. Everybody is so distracted these days! We are so bombarded with stimuli that we feel naked, lost, even agitated without it. The world is so much with us now that we’ve largely forgotten what it means to be without it.

Human nature hasn’t changed so much, which is why the poem is still so fitting. But technology has enabled us to move away from Nature, and thus that deepest part of ourselves, with increasing ease and efficiency. People can’t do anything anymore without a cell phone attached to their ear. And god forbid we miss an email or Facebook update because we’re on vacation. We can’t “get away from it all” anymore because now we can take it all with us. And we call this progress!

Few people even question this anymore. We take for granted that driving, shopping, and going for walks are now opportunities to talk on our phones. I’ve seen people answer their cell phones in restaurants and carry on a conversation while their companion idly waits, neither of them questioning the practice. I’ve seen people on their phones while walking their dogs, on hiking trails, while working out at the gym, and riding their bicycles. I once saw a person talking on his phone while riding a unicycle! At one time, these were activities we did to be alone with ourselves, recharge our batteries, and get grounded. Now, they are all opportunities for further distraction.

Why is an activity no longer enough in itself? Why, when we drive, can we not just be driving? Why, when we walk, can we not just be walking? Why do activities have to be an excuse to do something else? Why do we feel like one simple activity is not enough?

What is it we’re trying so hard to distract ourselves from?

I wrote about this awhile back in Multitasking: Its Real Appeal, and I think the problem has gotten worse just in the two years that have passed. Rather than learning how to use technology to serve us and improve our quality of life, instead we’ve allowed its place in our lives to be even larger and even more insistent than ever. Sigh.

Take time to just drive. To just walk. To just sit. To just be. For it is in these spaces, the quiet ones, the ones that come in-between the demands of the world, where we find the magic, the gold, the joy. They are the secret to unlocking the essence of who we are.

It is really that simple.

First, you can tell a person’s maturity level by how well they listen in general. Are they usually available for you? Do you feel comfortable talking to them, and know this is a person you can count on for good counsel and feedback? If so, then this person probably has some stuff figured out.

It’s probably human nature to globalize when you’re feeling bad. You know what I mean: when you go through a break up, you think you’ll never be loved again. Or when you’re job hunting and don’t find something right away, to feel that you’re never going to be successful. Or when you have a disagreement with a friend, to assume the friendship is over.

Usually it takes coming out the other side of a crisis–whatever it may be–to gain perspective about it. When people (people like me, anyway) are going through things they can’t see the end of, they panic. Not necessarily in a loud, external fashion, but internally, with thoughts like, I’ll never find anyone who loves me or I’ll never feel good about myself again. It isn’t until the crisis has passed that we’re able to step back and think, how silly I was to think that was going to last forever! And this is true not just for the major emotional hits, but for myriad tiny ways we react to situations. In fact, the emotions we tend to deem as innocuous might be the most important because they encompass the bulk of our day-to-day emotional life. Being able to look at “routine” emotions might be helpful when dealing with the bigger ones when they come along.

I realized this recently when I emerged out the other side of a minor emotional crisis. So minor, in fact, that I hadn’t noticed how it was wearing on me day after day–for a couple of years! It was only when it had passed that I realized how I had been seeing myself in a way that was completely inaccurate. I’d globalized and come to conclusions that were based much more on my anxiety than on reality. Through this–and probably because it was a small thing, so I didn’t have big emotions distracting me–I began to think about perspective, about how important it is to try to maintain a realistic view about myself and about what’s going on in my life.

I think I could frame my entire healing curve as an ever-increasing gaining of perspective: I’m not bad. I’m not less-than. I’m not unlovable. And up from there. For me, gaining perspective has been one long lesson of not immediately thinking the worst about myself. This attitude is so deeply ingrained that it took me awhile to realize it’s there, coloring my view and distorting my perspective about situations large and small. But just knowing that it’s there is helpful in gaining perspective. Since I figured this out, growth has largely been a matter of ever-deeper understanding of this filter through which I see the world. There are others, but this is the main one.

Not everybody has my issues, but everybody does have “self filters” through which they view the world. The closer those filters match reality, the better we’re going to feel about everything. That’s what gaining perspective is: matching your personal view with reality.

Now I realize “reality” is a vague word that can mean a lot of different things, so it needs a more precise description. By “reality,” I mean emotional reality. That is, understanding how your emotions color your worldview and being able to identify what’s accurate in your feelings and what is not. For example, if you have an argument with your partner, are you able to objectively determine which parts of it you are responsible for and which you aren’t? At first, few of us are; we are too angry or preoccupied with proving our point to consider our part. But after awhile, after tempers calm and the heat of battle passes, we start to look at the situation differently. Maybe I did overreact a little. Maybe I’m sensitive about that issue because of my past. Maybe he really didn’t mean it the way I thought he did. Armed with a new perspective, we extend the olive branch, ready to make peace. And our partner is ready, too, or will be shortly.

The point is that when we gain perspective, we gain serenity. Perspective is important for a sense of well-being. The sooner you can gain perspective and the longer you can maintain it, the better off you’ll be. So why not just try to have that perspective all the time? We don’t need to wait until we’re old and have seen it all and done it all. We can learn from the elderly and adapt their circumspect view of life right now, today. We can learn to listen to the voices of calm and reason and let them override our less dependable emotional utterings.

I’m not saying emotions aren’t important. They’re crucial. But there’s a difference between having your emotions and your emotions having you. The better we know ourselves and the better we understand how our emotions affect our view of reality, the more able we’ll be to apply our emotional energy to the things that really matter, how we want to, when we want to.

Everything resolves itself eventually, and we come out the other side, usually stronger, usually wiser. And I believe this is true even beyond death. Everything is going to be alright, no matter what. Once you understand this, it becomes truly possible to squeeze the most out of every moment.

From R.D. Laing:

The range of what we think and do

is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice

that we fail to notice

there is little we can do

to change

until we notice

how failing to notice

shapes or thoughts and deeds.

Many many years ago, I spent a week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I was still young and wild, and it was my first trip out of the country. I went with a hard-partying girlfriend and we had a rollicking good time, the details of which I will spare you as they are not relevant to the point (and for the sake of my own embarrassment, and because I can’t remember all that many of them). One thing I will share, though, that was new and wonderful for a Midwestern girl, is that I spent as much time as I could manage on the beach. Oh, that beach was magical, with the diamond sparkling waves going on forever and the hypnotic, eternal rush of water at the golden sand. It may have been my first, very primitive, experience with meditation. I couldn’t get enough of it. I lay next to the water all day, and walked the beach at night, sometimes sober, usually not, but it didn’t matter. The ocean grabbed hold of me and it has never let go.

On my last day, before we had to leave for the airport, I went down to the beach alone, settled in a chair, and stayed for as long as I could. I wanted to remember everything I could about that beach, as vividly as I could, so I sat in the chair and soaked in as much as possible, making a conscious effort to file it all away in a prominent place in my memory. I turned my face to the sun and felt its radiant yellow warmth on my face, my arms, my bare feet. I breathed in the salty breeze lifting at my hair and blowing through my cotton shirt. I listened to the roar of the ocean ebbing to a trickle as it rushed toward me, darkening the sand over and over and over, sometimes foamy white, sometimes just fingers of wet, depending on the strength of the wave. Then I squinted off to the horizon, where the water and sky met, separated by their distinct shades and textures of blue, each magnificent in its own right, each perfect and essential and seemingly eternal in my mind. And the manic flashing waves themselves, glinting with white sparkles too bright to watch directly for more than a few seconds, seeming so vital they could fool you into thinking they were alive. I also remembered the gritty feeling of the sand, the pull of the undertow, the floating on the waves that I’d done all week, the perfectness of the days, the mystery of the nights. I sat there until I felt sure I’d be able to recall any of it at a moment’s notice for the rest of my life, and you know what? To this day—almost 20 years later—I can. While I’ve forgotten many of the activities I’d done down there, the physical sensations of that beach are still fresh like it was just yesterday. Fresh and magnificent. I can close my eyes and remember what it was like leaning back in that chair on that beach, feeling totally and magnificently and consciously present for the first time in my life.

Sure, this brings up all sorts of questions about memory, about how what I remember today is different than what I remembered five or ten years ago, which in turn are different from the actual event, because I am a different person at all these times and memory is something that happens in the present. And while I understand that and know it to be the case, this isn’t really what I’m talking about. This sort of memory is more applicable to facts and events. The memory I’m talking about is the memory of sensations and feelings. For example, maybe you had a nightmare as a child that has stayed with you. But it isn’t really the details of the dream that have stayed with you (although you may remember a few of them), it’s the terror, and that can still be as real as if you’d experienced it yesterday.

So I figured something out that day on the beach in Puerto Vallarta. I call it “meta-noticing,” but it’s probably some age-old Buddhist mindfulness technique that I think I’ve discovered but am actually just recycling. Anyway, here’s what I do when I want to remember something vividly. First, I commit to the process by putting everything else on hold and allowing myself as much time as I’ll need (not usually more than twenty minutes, but I allow myself to go as long as I want to). I get comfortable. I close my eyes, and just soak in the sounds and the smells and the feelings until they become a part of me. Then I open my eyes and scan from the horizon to the space around me until I can see it with my eyes closed. Then I change positions so I can see another part of the horizon and other space around me. Then I just stay there for as long as I want to or as long as I can and enjoy all the sensations to the best of my ability, trying to keep my mind empty of everything but the sight, sound, and smell of my surroundings.

I did this on the chilly gray shore of Lake Superior. I did it on a dock in northern Minnesota on a night so dazzling with stars you could barely find the Big Dipper. I did it on a mountaintop in the Bighorn Mountains, with snow above me and spring flowers below me. I did it at the Grand Canyon. I did it the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean, peeking over cliffs from brambles at the side of the road into a blueness so deep it looked like a painting, its roaring muted by the distance. I did it the day I graduated from college (although I was distracted by a lot, making a full-body memory less than perfect). I did it for just a few moments at my mother’s funeral, catching a quick glimpse of the true nature of everybody there, feeling a sense of oneness and compassion that I had never before or since experienced with quite so much clarity. And I’ve had numerous such experiences with my partner Jim, most so mundane you’d laugh if I shared them (and so would he, probably), but each one a golden moment of time that I will hold precious for as long as I live.

I suppose this also brings up questions about what memories are more important: facts and events, or emotions and sensations. My simple answer is that both are important, but that our minds are not well-suited to remembering facts and events very well, and that’s one reason we have language: so we can make records of them. Our mind is, however, amazingly capable of remembering feelings and sensations accurately, and this being the case, we can learn to use this memory to our advantage if we so wish.

I don’t really have an opinion about whether meta-noticing is critical to one’s happiness or sense of well-being. I’m not going to say it’s a habit that one ought to cultivate in order to find serenity or become a more whole person. I really don’t know if any of that’s true. I do, however, think it’s true that the more present we can be in each moment of our lives, the more full our lives will be, and that goes for the bad as well as the good. Remembering the bad fully makes the good that much sweeter, and remembering the good fully makes the bad that much more tolerable. Taken to its logical conclusion—you figure out what that means—the fullness of memory might make the difference between happiness and misery when memory is one of the few things we have left to bring us joy.

A friend of mine just had his 20-year high school reunion. He didn’t go, having no interest in seeing people he never talked to in high school to begin with, but one of his friends did. The report on it was less than stellar, and the guy who went seemed kind of sad and lost around the whole thing, like whatever he’d wanted to happen didn’t, but he didn’t know what that would have been in the first place.

According to my friend’s friend, the group of “popular” guys—the jocks, in my high school nomenclature—showed up together in a rented limo, sans wives and already thoroughly drunk. They hung together all night, maintaining their adolescent clique, and essentially proving their persistent immaturity. As repugnant as all that is to me, mostly I just find it sad and empty.

Like all nostalgia.

Nostalgia has been huge in recent years. Oh, nostalgia has always had a certain appeal, but lately, in the past decade or so, that appeal seems to have been tweaked up a notch or two. It’s become an extremely effective marketing tool: New cars that look like old cars, new movies re-made from old movies, new versions of old songs, TV shows set in the seventies, as well as clothing styles, hair styles, and accessories reminiscent of styles from two to four decades ago. This increased interest in the recent past might be due to middle-aged baby boomers who want to relive their youth and now have the purchasing power to buy items they couldn’t afford as young adults. While I think that’s valid, I also think there’s more to it. Nostalgia has become a cultural zeitgeist, and I think one important to understand, because the pressure to succumb to it can be enormous, and doing so can be a way to avoid dealing with the present.

Let’s look at how that could be the case.

Nostalgia is more than having fond memories about the past. It’s about longing for a simpler, more vivid, or happier time. According to Dictionary.com, the etymology of the word comes from “severe homesickness.” Homesickness is a feeling of being scared and overwhelmed by one’s environment, or at the very least, of wanting one’s environment to be different. Nostalgia, then, is homesickness applied to the timeline of one’s life: a longing for the present to feel as good as the memories of the past.

But that past did not exist, and therein lies the problem: nostalgia is a fundamentally dishonest way to view history, one that can hamper our ability to deal effectively with the present. Our past, you see, was just as full of existential problems as our present is, and we need only spend a few minutes thinking about it logically to realize this. While today we may be worried about paying a mortgage and saving for retirement, twenty years ago we were worried about paying rent and launching a career. Today, we worry about our spouse and kids; twenty years ago, we worried about the stress and humiliations of dating and the possibility of being single forever. In hindsight, the problems of youth may seem simple compared to the problems of middle age, but if you’re honest with yourself, it’s just hindsight. You had just as much anxiety about your problems then as you do about your current ones. Maybe even more, as you had fewer coping skills to draw on then, which is itself another source of stress for a young adult. We may wish we were younger, but only until we remember how foolish and naïve we actually were in our twenties!

Nostalgia is a sort of projection, in the Freudian sense, of our present anxieties into our past. That is, we avoid dealing with what we long for in the present—deeper connections, a greater sense of power over our fate, or simply that some of our psychological troubles would go away—by escaping into an idealized past. In this past, we were beautiful, popular, and powerful. Our friends were better, our jobs were better, our parties were better. Even our cars, clothes, and movies were better. We felt excited and hopeful about life. In this past (which is actually just a present thought about the past), we are free to feel euphoric without reality stomping its ugly footprint onto the scene and requiring us to take action. In a very real way, nostalgia is much like the altered state induced by drugs or alcohol.

The extent to which we indulge in nostalgic longing is largely the extent to which we avoid dealing with our current psychological and emotional issues. I am not talking about meeting obligations and responsibilities; I am talking about how effective we feel, really feel, in matters of autonomy, self-expression, emotional fulfillment, and the like. It can be extremely difficult to consider, or even to be aware of the necessity to consider, these internal states when living in a culture that actively discourages such consideration. Both self-awareness and cultural awareness are necessary to do so.

If an entire culture partakes in nostalgia, what does that say about that culture? Perhaps that its primary emotional undercurrents consist of anxiety and fear, and its best attempts at dealing with them have been escape, denial, projection, and intellectual dishonesty; perhaps that these undercurrents reflect the sentiments of a majority of its individuals. Probably both, although I am not a sociologist and this is only a theory.

A culture of nostalgia occurs, I think, in times of rapid change or political upheaval that can leave people feeling overwhelmed, anxious, alienated, and powerless. The entire twentieth century had plenty of both, but no decade more so than its last, with the post-Soviet global regrouping, the rise of terrorism, rampant new technologies, and the advent of the Information Age (the Internet, to be precise, which has changed the world landscape on a scale not seen since the printing press, or perhaps nuclear weapons). Add to this the anxiety about entering a new millennium (historically, turns of centuries have always evoked a milieu of unrest), along with all the ongoing problems of the modern world, and you have a culture ripe for nostalgic yearnings. It is not a coincidence that fundamentalist Christianity and the New Age movement (in all their iterations) have experienced huge growth in recent years. Both offer escapist, anti-rational approaches to solving life’s existential problems, and both are, without exception, part of the problem and not part of the solution. Like all forms of nostalgia, they serve only to distract us from the real issues in our lives and the resources best called upon to deal with them.

What are those resources? In essence, self-awareness, honesty, and the willingness to deal with life on life’s terms (to steal a phrase from the friends of Bill W.), all of which can be more difficult to come by than we care to admit. Multitudes have been written elsewhere about all of these, including this blog, so I won’t go into the hows and whys of them now. Suffice to say that these are the traits that will get you where you want to be in life, and the more earnestly you practice them, the more success you will have.

One more thing, and it is an important one: You must come to realize that the present is the best time of your life, period. Now, and now, and now. No matter what you’re going through, no matter how you’re feeling, no matter what unfulfilled dreams weigh you down. The present is the only moment in which you can make choices and changes and fully experience all the aspects of being alive. Now, and now, and now. The present, with all its demands and sorrows and possibilities, is the only game in town.

It may all sound cold and logical, and I know human existence demands more; I am not ignoring that or belittling it. Myths and dreams, pleasure and play are all essentials of existence, too. But they can all be experienced fully without sacrificing self-awareness. More so, actually. There is no dichotomy between logic and myth, logic and dreams, or logic and pleasure. They can—and should—all exist simultaneously, harmoniously, enjoying and nourishing each other in an upward spiral of growth and creativity. Nostalgia detracts from this vision of life by making dreams and pleasures an unattainable part of a nonexistent past. Don’t do that to yourself.

It’s probably a good thing that the human memory tends to romanticize the past rather than the other way around, but it’s also something we need to be aware of. If you’re lucky you had a good youth, but dwelling on it won’t make your life better today. I think that’s what my friend’s friend discovered when he felt so let down after his high school reunion. His unmet expectations were probably more about some emptiness in his life today, emptiness that cannot be filled by trying to re-live an idealized past.

The only question now is, what will he do about it?

(Or: How to do Several Things at Once, All of Them Badly)

When I was a kid, I remember my father saying about one of my less introspective friends that “she’d go nuts if she had to be alone in a room for more than half an hour.” This was an ominous foretelling of what the post-industrial world has, in many ways, become. One way to look at that is to consider multitasking, doing several things at once in order to save time and increase efficiency. At work, multitasking may be an asset, as long as it doesn’t distract you from your most important tasks. But in the personal realm, multitasking is nothing but a way to miss out on your life. And assuming that most of the activities in your personal life are pleasurable, that’s very sad indeed.

I think our obsession with multitasking is a result of living in a society inundated with stimuli. Overstimulation is a real problem. Unless we consciously seek to shut it out, we are constantly bombarded with sensory stimuli. Television, radio, iPod, billboards, newspapers, email, the Internet, cell phones; you can’t even fill your gas tank, push a grocery cart, or use a public restroom without some sort of advertising assaulting your senses. We’ve gotten so used to all this stimuli that we can feel lost without it, and seek to create it in our own lives. Busy-ness for its own sake has become a shared cultural value for many. Thus it’s become a common perception that if we’re doing several things at once, stimulating ourselves in as many ways as possible, we’re being productive and useful.

This is, of course, a fallacy.

If we’re doing several things at once, it’s more likely that we’re doing all of them poorly, and not giving our full attention to any of them. Multitasking is kind of a chronic state of inattentiveness, and inattentiveness is a serious issue, because the stuff we’re not paying attention to is the substance of life. It’s easy to miss what’s going on in front of you and, more importantly, miss what’s going on inside of you.

We are beings, not doings. If you’re uncomfortable with simply being, you aren’t fully experiencing your life. Quiet time is necessary for introspection; introspection is necessary for awareness, authenticity, and growth. A steady diet of external stimuli causes us to miss out on all of this. There is more beauty and wisdom possible in one quiet moment of solitude than in a million moments of stimulus bombardment. This is because in that one quiet moment, a moment where you’re present with yourself, you have the opportunity to transform. In fact, this is largely what you’re distracting yourself from.

Why? Because it’s easier. Inattentiveness, distraction, focusing on minutia, or not focusing on much of anything at all, keeps us from exploring deeper questions and meanings in our lives. When we are introspective, we have to think about things we’d rather not think about: what makes us sad, what we haven’t accomplished, how we’d like our relationships to be better, god, mortality, etc.. It’s easy to avoid these things, and the distractions of modern life compound this easiness, but if we don’t take time to ponder them, then they remain unaddressed, and we make our way through life like a rudderless ship lost at sea, with no direction and no bearing, completely at mercy to the wind and weather. Easier, maybe, but infinitely less satisfying.

Have you ever seen someone out on a date answer her cell phone the instant it rings? I eavesdrop sometimes, out of curiosity, and sometimes, it’s an important call about business or children or a family emergency. But more often than not, an inane, pointless conversation ensues while the person’s dinner partner stares into space.

I used to marvel at this rudeness. I used to wonder why people would bring their cell phones everywhere with them: on walks, bike rides, picnics, dinners out, movies; why, I thought, would anyone want to be that accessible? After all, the phone is a tool for my convenience. I’m not supposed to become a slave to it. Then I realized that the cell phone has become one of the greatest multitasking tools ever created. Its power to distract from the present moment has no equal. While the cell phone didn’t create the problem, it has certainly exacerbated it. It is the ultimate tool of inattentiveness. It’s created this weird mindset that, even if we are enjoying what we’re doing, we feel compelled to stop doing it when the phone rings, especially if there are strangers around to observe. “See?” We say to them in our heads. “I am cool enough to get phone calls.” It’s almost as if it means that we’re taking part, that we’re an active member of society, or that it’s somehow a validation of our self-worth to receive a phone call.

It doesn’t mean any of these things, of course. All it means is that you’re unconcerned about being rude to the people you’re with or about being inattentive to what you’re in the middle of doing. Also, that you’ve bought into the idea that anyone who wants your attention must be more important than whatever you’re currently doing.

The deeper reason, though, that cell phones, along with all the other distractions of modern life, have the hold over us that they do is that we don’t want to be quiet with ourselves. Doing so almost certainly means facing some sort of unpleasant awareness, and who wants that? As long as we can keep busy and keep conversing, no matter how banal the tasks or conversations, we don’t have to look at ourselves. And that is the real appeal of multitasking. We get to see ourselves as productive and fulfilled even as we avoid dealing with the tough issues that will actually make us that way.

What a scam. But then, the best scams are the ones that allow us to believe what we want to believe, aren’t they?

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success. – Swami Sivananda

I could give a list of things to do—or not do—to make better use of your time. Things like:

• Make daily task lists and check off activities when you complete them.
• Be disciplined about watching television, surfing the Internet, playing video games, and other time wasters: if you must indulge, allow yourself a set amount of time, and adhere to it.
• Cut out all non-essential meetings and obligations wherever possible and use that time to complete tasks.
• Avoid interruptions and procrastination.
• When you know you’ll have time to kill, such as waiting for a doctor appointment, bring productive material to work on.

All of these are good guidelines, but they’re not really anything new. You can find them, and many more, in any book or article about using your time more efficiently. And while all such pointers are helpful, and the use of specific behaviors and tools can indeed improve your use of time, none of them get at the underlying issue, which is this:

The secret to not wasting time is not so much to stop doing frivolous things, but to stop doing things frivolously.

In other words, be mindful about everything you do. Everything. From meetings with co-workers to washing dishes, to going for a walk, to driving, immerse yourself deeply in all of your activities. When you’re able to do this, everything has meaning, because the things that don’t just kind of naturally fall out of your life. For example, you won’t have to go through an internal struggle anymore about not turning on the television or indulging in other activities you don’t feel good about; they won’t even register on your radar screen. When you develop the quality of mindfulness, the problem of wasting time evaporates as if into thin air.

Furthermore, mindfulness can make the dullest of tasks a path to wisdom, self-awareness, and inner peace (really!). The Buddhists have a saying, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” That is to say, it’s not so much what you do, it’s how you do it; we will always have mundane chores in our lives, but it’s possible to find joy and satisfaction—and maybe even enlightenment—in doing them. If mindfulness can do that for mundane chores, imagine what it can do for everything else!

All mindfulness means is paying attention. As simple as that sounds, it can be a difficult thing to practice. In fact, no one is 100% mindful all the time. But those who have good powers of concentration tend to be the most productive. Think of something you’ve done that you were fully immersed in, for example, reading a good book, watching a good movie, making love, or doing something creative. Now think of applying that level of attention, or close to it, to every moment of your life. Sounds a little intimidating, doesn’t it?

Certainly, mindfulness is a lifetime task. But the alternative is to miss all the moments that don’t stand up and grab your full attention. In other words, the vast majority of moments.

How do you develop mindfulness? One of the best ways is through meditation. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of meditation techniques. You can buy books about it, or find a class on beginning meditation (sometimes even called “Mindfulness Meditation” or the like), or look it up on the Internet for more options. Some methods have religious affiliations, but many don’t.

Perhaps the easiest way to get started is with a guided meditation tape or CD. All these require is setting aside the time to listen; you don’t need to buy any special equipment or clothing, you just need to find a comfortable couch or bed to relax on and let the guide do the rest. One program I recommend is Holosync, which has proven results (check out their website for more information).

If none of these appeal to you, just set aside some time as often as you can to be still and go inside yourself.  Because really, that’s all meditation is.

Whatever you choose, it should be something you can enjoy; and I guarantee, you will never have had this much fun becoming more productive!

Once you’ve established a mindfulness practice that you enjoy, and you’ve noticed improvements in your levels of concentration, relaxation, and sense of well-being (all of which and more come almost instantaneously from any meditation practice) then perhaps you will want to revisit your to-do lists and time strategy tools. You are likely to see them with new eyes, and you are also likely to be amazed at how easy it is to make good decisions and follow through on them.

Using your time well is about more than developing a strategy, or even self-discipline. It’s about having a deep, solid understanding of what you value and why you value it. If you really want to change—and this is true for anything, not just time use—it is essential to address underlying belief systems. True change is not possible without doing so.

Mindfulness creates meaning in everything you do. In so doing, it circumvents the whole problem of wasting time by bringing your focus to a higher level of thought and action. Once you understand what’s important and why, wasting time becomes a moot point.

All “be here now” means is being fully present in the moment. This may sound simple, or maybe even meaningless. But it’s neither. If you learn only one spiritual principle in your life, make it this one. Mastering this concept is a guaranteed path to contentment, serenity, inner peace, and eventually, enlightenment. Guaranteed.

If you think it’s simple, or that you already do it naturally, try this exercise: find a place you can sit undisturbed for five full minutes. Pick one thing to focus on for the five minutes. The thing could be your breath, a sound, sensations in your body, a single repeated word or phrase (that is, a mantra), counting, or anything else that’s simple and easy to keep your attention on (in your head, so you can’t use any props). Now sit there and focus on it. Set a timer. If you really pay attention, you will quickly realize how difficult it is. If you can stay focused for thirty seconds, without any other thoughts creeping into your awareness, then you are doing amazingly well. Now imagine how difficult it is in your day-to-day life, when you’re not making an effort.

If you are not “here now,” that means whatever you’re doing is not fully engaging you. When you’re working, you’re thinking about when you won’t be working. When you’re not working, you’re worried about what you didn’t get done. When you’re with friends, you’re thinking about your spouse. When you’re with your spouse, you’re thinking about your friends. When you’re with your family, you just shut down completely because you’d rather by anywhere else doing anything else. (I hope you don’t feel this way about your family. It’s just an example.)

An old friend of mine had a very annoying habit. Whatever the topic of conversation, she had done it somewhere else with someone else, and it was always better than what we were talking about. Whoever we were with, she always had better friends somewhere else. Whatever we talked about doing, she had a fond memory of doing a better version of it. She was always wistful and sincere about her adventures, not mean-spirited, but eventually I just stopped spending time with her because I always ended up feeling bad. I couldn’t live up to the friends of her stories, and I finally gave up trying. She considered herself a very spiritual person, but she had absolutely no capacity for being content in the present moment. In fact, she worked quite hard at not being present. In so doing, her life was passing her by, and she had no awareness of it at all.

For that’s what happens when you aren’t “here now.” Your life passes you by. If you are worried about future events or ruminating over past events, your present passes you by like an unnoticed stranger. And the present is all we have! This doesn’t mean that you don’t think about the past or the future; “be here now” does not mean live only for today. It means that if you are thinking about the past or the future, you are doing so deliberately, with intent, because you try to do everything with intent. Daydream, but do so with relish; get lost in reverie, fill yourself up with it. Work with enthusiasm. Find interest in your surroundings. Be present.

How do you know if you aren’t living in the present? If you have to ask, then you probably aren’t. Fortunately, nobody goes through life completely non-present. Here are some activities that are very hard not to be present for:

• Reading a good book or watching a good movie
• Focused activity such as writing or other artwork
• Taking a test
• Strenuous physical activity
• Sex
• A dangerous situation (being in physical danger)
• A thrilling situation (riding a roller coaster, skydiving, white-water rafting, motorcycling).

All of us have experienced some of these things, and so we know what it’s like to be fully present. How full is a moment full of fear, or of exhilaration? All of our moments can be that full. Not in the same way, but satisfying nonetheless. Some people mistake thrill-seeking for living in the moment. They think that by putting themselves in high-adrenaline situations, they are living life to the fullest. They have the motivation right, but they got the execution wrong. The real challenge is to find similar fullness in every moment of existence. Trying to live from peak to peak only results in everything else feeling flat, which is the exact opposite of what being fully present is about.
Here are some ways not to be present:

• Being preoccupied while you’re supposed to be focused
• Being a poor listener
• Being agitated or worried
• Being self-conscious
• Having a low regard for your current activity.

In general, just not paying attention. When the noise inside your head is too loud, it drowns everything else out.

The noise in our heads is the culprit, you see. The voices of fear and self-consciousness, shame, resentment, and envy; if we have not found a way to quiet them, they make it very, very difficult to be fully present with anyone or anything else. To see this, here’s another little exercise to try. Spend some time watching a group of people, any group of people. In a meeting at work, at a party, in a coffee shop, it doesn’t matter. If you observe carefully, you will soon notice that everyone in the group’s main concern is the same, and it is this: “What are they all thinking about me?” Often, that concern is so overriding, it affects our ability to be a good worker, a good friend, a good spouse, or a good parent. Instead of focusing on being a good worker, we focus on getting our bosses’ approval. Instead of being a good spouse, we focus on getting our spouse’s approval. And so on. Something tragic is lost in this jump, and that is our authenticity. When we pay too much attention to the voices of fear and self-consciousness in our heads, our authentic self is lost to us. There is nothing more tragic.

How to quiet the noise? Focused activity is one way. When you are engaged in something you truly enjoy, you are “here now.” Another way is meditation. In fact, meditation is the act of training your mind to be focused; that is, if done regularly, it quiets down the noise enough so that you can be present and mindful in all of your activities.

Meditation has many benefits. There is medical evidence that meditation reduces stress, lowers high blood pressure and cholesterol, increases alpha brain waves (the relaxation waves), helps heal from injury and disease, and helps with insomnia and PMS. People who meditate regularly are more spontaneous, independent, self-confident, empathetic, and less fearful of death. The list goes on and on. Visit any meditation website to find out more information. You will be amazed. (Here’s one, here’s one, and here’s one to get you started.)

There are many different ways to meditate. Some have religious affiliations, but many don’t. Although all the big religions—Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity—have meditation practices, meditation is not a religious activity. It is, however, an intensely spiritual one, because it is the best thing going for taking the journey inward. If you can’t find a method you like, then just commit to making time every day to sit quietly with yourself. You’ll find it so wonderfully relaxing, and its benefits so astounding, that soon you won’t be able to do without it. Perhaps you’ll want to find others who are meditating and sit in a group setting. The support and kinship of a meditation group can be a wonderful experience. Whatever you decide to try, enjoy this new life adventure, and remember that it won’t be all roses and sunshine, because no adventure ever is. Sometimes those voices do not want to be quieted, and reaching a place of serenity can take awhile. You can have periods of physical discomfort, anxiety, and frustration. That’s all fine; it means you’re on the right path.

There is an infinity in each moment that we can’t notice unless we are fully present. Each moment contains breath, touch, sounds, sights, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and environmental stimuli. Each one of these categories is an infinity unto itself. Each one of them is an invitation to “be here now.” Do yourself a favor, and accept the invitation.