What We Talk About When We Talk About “Mindfulness” | Series
This is to tell of “mindfulness” in all its varieties of manifestation, and how I’ve come to tell of it. 50 years ago, who’d heard the word? Today, it seems everything is calling itself “mindful.” To preface my diving in towards clarity, I’d like to briefly introduce my own historical perspective. Why? Well, for one thing, I don’t see mindfulness as an object, or a website, or an app. Rather, I feel it as not a product but a process. As such, time enters into it.
To paraphrase Holden Caulfield, I won’t begin with who my father was, and who my mother was, and all that David Copperfield sort of stuff. Simply, I can pinpoint myself as a seeker the path of self-realization since I was ten. It can start that early, if we don’t get tricked into giving it up for a blasé, unquestioning adulthood. And now, Gosh!, I’m in my 70s. (What a thing to do to a boy!)
Well, were I to pause, and ask myself, “Am I not only older, but also any wiser than before,” I’d say No! Looking at my life as a landscape, I can see the various formations of my epochs— a meadow here, a valley there, a lofty mountain, a terraced cliff — and me doing the utmost with the particular causes and conditions of each terrain.
