Live in the moment

Once I saw a Dutch comedian explaining in her show how tiring life actually really is. First she complained about what a drag it is to come all the way to the theatre. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just clap your hands and zoom, you would be in the theatre. Or even better: you would have dropped off your coat, had a coffee and were already in your chair. Or wait a minute: what if you could just clap your hands and then you would have seen the show and you would be back home again. She continues until the inevitable climax: you know what would be really, really, really easy? If you would just clap your hands and bang: you’re dead, your life is over.

In her show the comedian showed how often we’re focused on the future and not on the moment. We dread all our errands and anticipate a later hour or a later day, when certain inconveniences of daily life will be done and over with. Which makes us forget to enjoy our life. “Once I make more money, I will redo my apartment and buy new furniture and then I will really start entertaining and keep everything tidy and then I will have such a great life. Yes, then I’ll be happy.” Or: “ Once the kids are a bit bigger, I will really start to work out and become thin, and then I’ll cook from that nice new cooking book that has been lying on that shelf for more than a year. Yes, then I’ll be happy.”
Lots of self-help advice provides us with detailed instructions for a better life or even “our best life” in Oprah’s words. We try to keep our resolutions, but of course we never stick to them. (Except perhaps Gretchen Rubin, writer of “The Happiness Project” who keeps this control-freak chart for all her happiness enhancing tasks.) For most of us New Year’s resolutions however are a vague memory by February and the spring diet has been thrown out by summertime, when you actually needed it. So nothing really changes. Which most of the time is no problem at all, except when you’re the type that is very unhappy and is therefore craving change. And it actually so happens that there’s a lot of those people hanging around in New York.

A lot of self-help can be summarized as the live-in-the-moment-mantra. It’s in yoga, mindfulness and other eastern “traditional” ideas from Buddhism and Confucianism, which may not even be so traditional, but more or less an American variation on an old theme. Mindfulness is a concept with Buddhist origins and it focuses on living in the moment, also described as “presence” or “awareness”. It is used as a stress coping method and even as treatment for depression and anxiety and the results in the land of psychotherapy seem to all look pretty good. In short it’s about trying to stop solving all your problems by thinking them out, but instead trying to become more aware of your own body and your surroundings. You can do everything in a mindful way, so this is also a rich concept for the self-help industry, which has jumped on it. You can do mindful exercising, mindful sleeping and mindful eating. And buy books about it. But it all comes down to the same thing. For example: instead of gobbling up a bowl of pasta while thinking about your grocery list of today, you can eat slowly and be aware of the taste, the shape and the texture of every bite you put in your mouth. You don’t have to stop your thoughts. That’s impossible, because there are and always will be thoughts. The beginning is that you become aware of your thoughts and try to watch them float by without holding on to them. They’re “just thoughts”. Since ruminating is one of the symptoms of depression, you can imagine that being mindful may help when you’re depressed. Ruminating means endless thoughts about everything and then the thoughts about those thoughts and about the uselessness of those thoughts and the selfhate that eventually comes out of the thoughts and especially about the fact that they don’t solve anything. Watching your thoughts float by and being aware of your body and your surroundings is also the aim of meditation and one of the reasons why yoga teachers always make the improbable claim that the part where you lie still on your back and don’t move is the hardest part of the class. I always thought and still think it is actually the most relaxing, even now that I’ve been told not to fall asleep.

I love mindfulness, but I’m totally not a mindful person. In an overcrowded yogaclass with a very popular yoga teacher on the Upper East Side I try to watch my thoughts, but it’s really hard. I’m very much attached to my thoughts, I notice. What is left of me when I’m without my thoughts? Some kind of animal that uses its senses for observations and has purely primal responses to comfort or fear? For most of the yoga students I expect that their inner animal mainly has to deal with comfort, by the way. Which is easy enough when you’re into regular massages, spa treatments and shopping sprees. But on the other hand: it’s true that the feeling of the sun shining on your bare arms can be a pleasure and most of the time we’re not aware of it. And we are in fact sometimes locked up in our heads, while we actually crave to become part of some bigger scheme.

A human being is a part of a whole..but he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from those prisons by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty

This is not a yogi talking, but genius Albert Einstein. I guess the reason why mindfulness works is that it can help us to make that connection to the world around us. Although when I look around in the overcrowded yoga class before we start and I see almost nobody talking to each other, I think it’s still a lonely self-help path and I wonder if presence and awareness really make you connect to other people. But it can get you out of the prison of your own thoughts and that’s probably what’s so attractive for so many people. It definitely is a useful tool for an over-thinker like me.

Perhaps we’re all becoming more and more over-thinkers in time. And especially New Yorkers. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that yoga, mindfulness and awareness are so popular here. Perhaps it's all to be expected in a culture that seems to be in academic overdrive. Because at the same time New York is the place where Kindergarten tests, school application stress and classes for babies are considered normal parts of kids’ life. Where parents obsess about the different ways of making their kids smarter, starting with brain enhancing pills during pregnancy and ending with intensive tutoring to get into the right college. Where a summer camp is promoted as the perfect way to avoid “learning loss” when the school is closed. Where 40.000 schools have no recess time anymore, because it doesn’t have any “academic value”. The only way to make it here is by using your brains, by thinking. A lot. And not in a free and creative way, but mostly in a stressed and obsessed way. No wonder the yoga classes are full and the books about mindfulness sell like Magnolia’s cupcakes.

Being mindful has the potential to release us from the prison of our own heads every once in a while. Which may make the trip to the theatre even fun. I might suddenly see a beautiful pink sky. Or perhaps there’s a painting I like at the coatcheck. Perhaps I’ll see a puppy in the subway or a sweet old lady asks me for directions and I’m glad to help her out. Little things that can change your mood, but that I may not even notice when I’m thinking about how to get my kids into a good college. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll enjoy the show and loose the attachment to my train of thoughts: I may, for a while, live in the moment.