Savor the present

By Diane Evans
Knight Ridder News Service

Forget multitasking and try being mindful for a change ... It'll help you be a better (and happier) person. Jon Orque • The Honolulu Advertiser

That word — multitasking — came up at the bake shop the other day. "Are you multitasking, Bill?" the shop owner asked my husband. He had his cell phone going, his Palm Pilot, his morning coffee, everything.

"That must be the latest buzzword," Bill said as he looked up. "Someone asked me that same question over at the university."

Well, the contrast to multitasking is "living in the moment" — another expression I've been hearing lately. It's as if we know there must be an alternative to juggling 10 activities at once.

The idea of living in the moment, or mindfulness, can become complex if you talk to psychologists. The essence of it is this: Become aware of the here and now. If you're eating, taste your food. If you're walking the dog, enjoy the dog. One definition I ran across said that mindfulness meant paying attention on purpose. The point is to escape from stressful distractions, moment by moment, with the idea that the moments add up and you'll be calmer in the long run.

In the recent book "Destructive Emotions," a Buddhist monk, the Venerable Ajahn Maha Somchai Kusalacitto of Bangkok, explained that the highest level of mindfulness is the point where you can short-circuit your knee-jerk reactions, so you avoid destructive emotions from the start. Instead, you stay neutral, and you don't assign categories and labels to images or things that happen. (Your boss may be yelling, but by not rushing to judgment, you leave open the possibility that your boss is stressed over issues that have nothing to do with you.)

"When you act like this, your mind will stay very calm," the Venerable Kusalacitto said in the book. "No negative emotion that can harm you will come to you."

He went on to say that by practicing mindfulness, you can also become more aware of your own bad feelings — such as anger, jealousy and greed. The hard part is not being judgmental when stuff happens that we don't like.

In Venerable Kusalacitto's world, the mind becomes so highly cultivated that it reaches a point of invulnerability to such things as stewing for days. "You simply recognize whatever comes up in the mind as natural process, arising and passing, that stays with you for some period of time and then goes away," he said. "It does not stay forever. And then you can enjoy a state of peace and calm."

A lecturer at Chautauqua Institution this summer noted that in Christianity, the Sermon on the Mount can be interpreted as a call for mindfulness. He pointed to the verse where Jesus said, "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin."

There are many articles in scholarly journals, too, on the benefits of mindfulness — for good health, for maximum learning in the classroom, and even for doing business, where the cost of not paying close attention can be huge.

Psychologists sometimes speak of mindfulness and mindlessness in opposite terms. The Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School describes mindlessness as "a loss of awareness resulting in forgetfulness, separation from self, and a sense of living mechanically."

James Carmody, a professor affiliated with the center, said mindfulness can be easy if you're taking a nature walk, but that life isn't, well, a walk in the park. "It's much more difficult when you're at work and someone's shouting at you," he said. "Mindfulness is a way of employing attention, so it's nonreactive to what's around you. We don't get caught up in old reaction patterns, so we're able to respond to the way things are, rather than to the way we imagine them to be."