Yesterday in this space, we urged those who are finalizing their New Year’s resolutions to embrace Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements: “Be impeccable with your word,” “Don’t take anything personally,” “Don’t make assumptions” and “Always do your best.” We also pointed out that there is no one thinker or volume with all the answers, and that The Four Agreements is just one piece of the puzzle.
With that in mind, we offer a second piece.
By now, most people are familiar with the concept of mindfulness, or presence. “Living in the moment” has never been more fashionable, fueled to a large degree by the dynamic duo of Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle. In The Power of Now and A New Earth, Tolle argues that the human penchant for living in the past or an imagined future, all while rejecting the present moment, is responsible for the collective insanity of the species and a whole lot of individual suffering and misery. Tolle himself will tell you there’s nothing revelatory in his books. The transformative power of presence runs through many religions and philosophies, but Tolle figured out a way to package ancient wisdom for the modern masses. In Oprah, he found the perfect conduit.
The argument for presence makes perfect sense. Who hasn’t wasted hours – days even – reliving an embarrassing moment or worrying about a future disaster that may never come? Who hasn’t continued to argue their point internally long after a moment of confrontation with a spouse, co-worker or stranger has passed? Who wouldn’t like a little break from a brain that is ceaselessly judging, defending, assuming and condemning? Presence promises just such peace, but there’s a problem: Living in the moment for more than a few seconds at a time is difficult.
To be mindful requires a duality that can be uncomfortable and taxing. If you hope to stop the brain from wandering away from the present moment, you actually have to do what Tolle calls “watching the thinker”: “Listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence,” he writes in The Power of Now. Tolle is saying, perhaps admitting, that presence requires a high level of alertness – and therein lies the rub.
To understand why that’s a problem, consider the brain’s two “systems” as described by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 refers to the mind’s ability to “operate automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” An example of System 1 in action is driving a car on an empty road. System 2 refers to the allocation of attention “to the effortful mental activities that demand it.” Think filling out your taxes.
Tolle’s “watcher” is very much a function of System 2 – and System 2 is exhausting. Leaving the present moment for the remembered past or anticipated future – that is, the way most people spend their days – is System 1. If presence was the mind’s default setting and obsessing about past and future took great effort, this would be a very different world. But that’s not the case. Being mindful takes work, despite what some of its practitioners might have you believe. So where does that leave those who resolve to spend a little more time in the moment in 2017?
Of the pursuit of peace of mind, Spinoza wrote: “If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
This year, we hope everybody finds some peace in presence. Just know that it won’t be easy.