"Mindfulness" is Pressing Play
The term “mindfulness” has become a bit of a buzz word in society today, and it likely conjures up particular automatic images or connotations (positive or negative) when people think of what the word means. What does it mean to you? What’s the first image that comes to mind?
If you read one previous post of mine, you know my perspective on the true reality of words (that I see them as useful symbolic tools but not “real” in themselves), and I realize we must use words to communicate, but some words like “mindfulness” become particularly tricky because they may be referring to an experience beyond words. To me, it’s like the terms God, Tao, Brahma, Allah, or any other term for something that has deep meaning but may ultimately be incomprehensible and lose its potency when we attempt to fit it into some neatly packaged form. And when we use these particular terms over and over again, it’s nearly impossible to not start seeing the word itself as the “thing,” reifying it, and forgetting that it’s merely a symbol for an experience that you just feel. This is where analogies and metaphors can be so helpful. By comparing a complex word like “mindfulness” to a familiar image or experience, it can help us simply “get” the meaning more clearly without being caught up in conceptual baggage and connotation. So, here’s a musical analogy that I find useful in describing what may be the meaning of “mindfulness”:
When is it that you can actually listen to and experience music? Only when you’re pressing play. If you’re constantly pressing fast forward and rewind, you’re actively blocking the whole point of things. This also applies to living life – if you are constantly mentally time-traveling to the future or the past, then you are never really living, never really letting the music just play and never letting yourself simply listen for no other purpose than to enjoy it in this moment. It’s my belief that, especially in a culture of getting things done and constant, ever-present stimulation, just pressing play can feel nearly impossible. But that, to me, is what mindfulness is; remembering that this life we’re experiencing is like a song that has a beginning and an end and that the song is only playing right now. We can either keep pressing fast forward to prepare to listen to the song better in the future, or rewind to regret how we could have listened in the past (or missing the way we used to listen), or we can develop our ability to listen right now, like a connoisseur of this moment.
You could think of it like this:
Mindfulness = Pressing play
Practice of Mindfulness = Pressing pause in order to let yourself press play more often
The video below is a short animated talk from one of my favorite thinkers, Alan Watts, that articulates this analogy of life being like music. I’ve probably watched it 100+ times, hah.