Mindfulness

 I ran across an interesting article in The Guardian, The big idea: why you shouldn’t always try to live in the moment, which hits me on several different points. 

I am not convinced that we cannot live without our memories of the past. Yet, in my reading of Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Way, it is asserted that Orthodox Christians must live in the moment. Our Orthodox group at Fort Dix FCI concluded that mindfulness has a long-standing history in Orthodoxy. We cannot change the past, the future is unfolding as we live, and we must attend to our actions and thoughts in the present moment. Let me say, without imputing this to Kallistos Ware, it is an ethical matter to live in the present, to take care that our behavior is the least sinful possible, which, therefore, focuses on our behavior towards other people. That is the basis for my saying it is an ethical matter.

The writer of The Guardian piece also implies ethics:

I’ve been thinking a lot about being present and wondering why I should strive to achieve it. I am a parent. I am a professor. I have a life, and a job, that typically require not just my physical presence but my full emotional attention. This is what I’ve come to understand, via osmosis, at least: to succeed I need to be present. Ostensibly this is for my own wellbeing; but the implication is that I am also responsible for the wellbeing of others. In failing to be present, I might risk harming them too.

But the emphasis feels different from Bishop Ware. The mindfulness I believe was admonished for me as an Orthodox Christian surely cannot exclude what the secular writer fears is being excluded by secular mindfulness:

But what about nostalgia? What about fantasy? Are these so terrible? As it happens, I’d even like to make a pitch for rumination. Obsessive thinking doesn’t always lead nowhere; it can be like an inescapably intense form of dreaming. We might call this “drumination”. If the past and the future aren’t viewed as sites of harmful dread or regret, drumination might even be deemed healthy. Such a state could, with caution and critical thinking, guide ingenuity and creativity.

I guess I’m wary of the extent to which, now that it’s so widely sold and bought, the present, and the goal of living perpetually in it, might be misunderstood, or misused, or boiled down to nearly nonsense. To be forbidden, for the sake of your health, to exit the present might be a means of evading responsibility or consequence; to live in and for the present is to potentially exempt people from a continuum of cause and effect. To do this – to discourage people from linking the present to the past, and projecting into the future – is to create, paradoxically, an inescapable health risk.

Take this moment, right now. As I write, the air outside my New York apartment has been deemed “hazardous”. There are forest fires in Canada, and today the smoke arrived from the north. My husband said, “It’s like 9/11 out there,” and it was – the acrid smell, the yellow-grey haze that strikes the eye as incredibly wrong, or alarming. Our past was revisiting us and adding psychological heft to the moment. It felt, in a wrenching way, right to be recalling that time, recalling that fear, and using it as a way to think about the future and how different it might be from our formerly wildest imaginings. Our present hummed, urgently and compellingly with what had gone before and what might be awaiting us. I don’t know that an ethical life can be lived these days without a druminating eye cast toward such things.

For I also believe that we all carry our past with us as well as our imagination of possible pasts and of possible futures. I am working on two novels that incorporate these beliefs. 

I can accept the ethical duty to be aware of what we are doing at this present moment ethically. I cannot agree that ignoring the events that brought us to a particular point in time can be ignored. Our sensibilities are not dissolved and reformed at each instant; our standards cannot be reconstituted every moment. The wheel of our life cannot be reinvented constantly.  I read David Hume too long to think we can divorce our being from our experiences. Instead, we are our experiences, our imagining of different outcomes from those experiences, and our hopes of attaining the ends made desirable by experience and education.

But I am not so sure my two examples of mindfulness are incompatible. We cannot be ethical without having learned ethics. Having come this far, it seems if reject the lessons taught in the name of living in the moment, we reject all ethical and aesthetic standards. That is not life, that is not liberating; it is nihilism and self-destruction

sch 7/5