Attending Your Own Life

Most of the day passes on autopilot.

We walk a familiar route, eat while scrolling a screen, talk while preparing the reply in advance, and notice our own state only after the irritation has already picked an addressee.

Mindfulness isn’t a particular facial expression, nor a duty to feel delight at every cloud. It is a brief return of attention to what is happening.

Sometimes it is enough to stop and notice: what can be seen and heard, what is going on in the body, which emotion is present, what you are thinking about, what exactly you are doing and whether it matches the current task.

The question “what matters right now?” is useful not because it always produces a great answer. Sometimes what matters is finishing the calculation. Sometimes eating. Sometimes listening to someone. Sometimes stopping the performance of work and going to bed.

Such a question restores choice at the point where behaviour has almost become automatic.

Being present doesn’t mean giving up plans, memories and analysis. A person lives in several times at once, and that is one of their strengths. The problem arises when the present is used only as a corridor between regret about the past and rehearsal of the future. Sometimes the day is already happening. It is desirable to attend it now and then.

The test is domestic: try to recall what lunch tasted like. If you ate while messaging, there is no taste — the food was eaten, the pleasure wasn’t collected, and two hours later a vague wish for something else appears, because the system responsible for satiety wasn’t present either. The same goes for the walk home you can’t remember, and for the weekend that left only photographs behind.

The point of returning attention isn’t spirituality but bookkeeping. Time lived on autopilot is spent in full and credited in part. By December that difference adds up to the feeling that the year went by unnoticed. It really did go by unnoticed — few people were there for it.