WE live in unexplored territory. The human mind has never had so much to notice or absorb in the 16 or 17 hours of wakefulness we have each day. I’m 58, so I remember when there were two television channels, and neither of them was on all day long. No internet, no emails, phone calls were so expensive you had to ask your parents’ permission to use the one phone in the house. So boredom was far more likely for children and adults alike than overload.
I’m not one of the plethora of people who bemoan social media or the increasing use of technology. I’ve seen the best side of it when my family and our cousins in Australia kept each other in touch with developments as our respective mothers – who were sisters – slowly got increasingly ill and died. Mutual love and support, sympathy and grief flowed through the family Facebook group we created specifically for that purpose. It was an amazing experience, one we’ve kept up and added to, bringing in wider family, many of whom we had never previously been in contact with, some of whom have still never met face to face.
What concerns me is use of time. Time is all we have, and it’s a bit ungraspable. I instinctively think of time like a succession of beads on a string. In other words something tangible followed by another identical thing then another and so on.
But time isn’t like that at all. It just is. It’s an experience of the mind. By the time you even stop to think about what a moment is, it’s gone, seemingly to be replaced by another moment, then another. You can’t pin it down. But if you contemplate it looking backwards in time, you see something utterly different. Those moments are always lost to us. Used, misused or unused, they’re gone, and can’t be retrieved. How many of us occasionally find ourselves thinking of a past event and wishing we could go back in time and change it?
In reality each of us is unique. Equally however, the vast majority of us do similar sorts of things and have similar priorities in everyday life. Most people have to work to earn a living; we spend a lot of time watching TV, usually news, dramas, soap operas, and comedies according to the viewing figures. We spend hours on the internet, with social media now a significant part of our day. Apart from sleeping, eating and washing ourselves, these few groups of activities – work, television viewing, internet engagement – take up the bulk of our week days.
This jars with surveys of what matters most to us. What matters most is not work (except for the necessity of having to earn a living), television, the news or social media. It’s our physical health, our sense of wellbeing and purpose, and the health and happiness of our immediate family and closest friends. Those are the things people say matter most to them.
In a nutshell we want to attain one lot of things but in our actual lives do a series of things that don’t seem too related to these deepest aspirations.
To my mind the problem is not the internet, not social media, not the television. It’s the mind that has incrementally over decades been programmed by life, by society, by osmosis, to seek out these things rather than the things our deepest and most rational mind knows we need and want. Eventually they become unthinking daily habits.
The practice of mindfulness says: first just notice. This purpose of this column is to remind you to do this, then to act on what you notice.
When you notice that your mind is fixed on something irrelevant or even potentially harmful, then see if you can just stop for a few moments. Stop and notice more clearly what you’re doing and allow your mind to remember what you really want to do. Compare the two. If that means you then put down this magazine or switch off the computer you're reading this on, get changed into a tracksuit and go for a run, that’s exactly what mindfulness urges us to do.
You can go back to the column later, but your health is more important … except that this column is specifically designed to help you with an even more important thing – your mental health, your sense of joy of life. So maybe finish reading this first, soak in the importance of what it contains, then go and improve your fitness.
A day ends; and although it may seem like a pain in the neck to eat five or 10 veg and fruit a day, do your high-intensity cardio work or run, swim or cycle, if you don’t do it today then you’ve lost today’s chance to be as well as you can.
Simply stop for moments dotted through the day, and notice the grass, the sounds of birds, the fact that you have clean water from a tap, or any of a thousand things you can notice in a typical day. Maybe even forfeit one television programme to give you that space in each day. You will blossom as a human being. A day will gradually become a thing of inherent value and of utter beauty, and that will contribute immensely to your wellbeing. That television programme you gave up? The day will come when you can’t even remember what it was called.
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