The Halting Problem
That clarion hollering from your phone—it's your alarm. It’s 6:30 am, so get up. The morning is naked, quiet, and tender. Don’t be allured by it though. Pull yourself unceremoniously through this virgin morning into your work—it’s an hour away by train and it starts at 9, so hurry.
Psst. I know you’re still trundling through the Victorian tunnel network armpit to armpit with perfect strangers, but your phone buzzed. Fold your arm into your pocket and check it. That’s it. Your meeting will begin in 5 minutes without you. You’re late.
Work is over. You said some things to some people. You had lunch alone at your desk. It’s time to come home.
You’re home. It feels empty. Put the TV on for some noise. Cook. Daydream. Slump. It’s nearly time for bed. You can feel the impending workday hanging under the horizon, waiting to spring on you. The evening is hot and loaded with tension. You lie in bed. That clarion hollering from your phone—it's your alarm.
Unlinking
For untold numbers of people, this is the pattern of daily life. It’s incredibly stifling and counter to the improvisational bent of human consciousness. We feel as though there's no time to pause and rest. If we’re not doing necessary chores to keep ourselves going, we’re pursuing something else, lest we fall behind in education, work, companionship, and everything else. Capitalism is fast. Our identities are caught up in quickly obsolete products. Friend groups are shrinking, families are small, and local communities are only communities by definition, not in spirit. Almost everything is on our own shoulders.
Modern life is unbearably stressful, full-on, and unrewarding for many people. We’re stuck in cycles of anxiety, spirals of depression, and cages of stress. Fixing the world is going to be tough, but I think that there are psychological strategies to bring out lasting effects of peace, wisdom, and contentment.
Now, I’m about to use the words “mindfulness” and “meditation,” but before all of the “realists,” the skeptics, and the trousers on one-leg-at-a-timers click off, this article is very much for you. For most of my life, I’ve been uninterested in meditation because many of its exponents often tack on a spiritual aspect to it. The spirituality of meditation appeals to some, but it didn’t to me and many others. In this article, I want to explore a rational reason to make mindfulness and meditation a core part of your life, as well as how and why it works.
Slave
Unless you’ve given meditation a go, you may not even realize that you are helplessly thinking every waking moment. Whether it’s a clearly articulated conversation with yourself, an abstract feeling, an image, a sound, your mind is constantly fizzing with thought. Realize that you have no awareness of what you’ll think before you think it. You don’t bring about a thought consciously. You don’t even notice them as they arrive. You don’t question their providence. You merely think them. It’s a bit like dreaming. It’s a miracle we’re not constantly going, “Wait, what? I was just in bed and now I’m literally inside that movie I was watching last night.” A thought that you had no idea was coming appears, and you just accept it. We do it a million times a day.
The tragedy of this is that you’re not directly responsible for your thoughts, yet they totally color your experience from moment to moment. As Marcus Aurelius said, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” If you find yourself having sad thoughts, you’re sad; if your thoughts are angry, you're angry; if they’re stressful, you're stressed.
We’re totally enslaved to our outpouring of thoughts, and we become them. Meditation and mindfulness don’t force positive thoughts, but they give you a reprieve from them. We’ll cover that in more detail below. For now, let’s think about something else that meditation and mindfulness can help with.
Shoulder
How many of your thoughts moment to moment are anticipatory? How often are you anticipating the future? Worrying about a date, thinking about work tomorrow, the article you must write, the conversation you’re about to have, that friend you must speak to. We are constantly looking over the shoulder of the present moment to anticipate the future.
Sometimes when life slows down a little, we go into reverse gear and start recalling the past. But the past and the future aren’t really there. They’re thoughts. Thoughts that you’re having in the present. Rather than truly being “in the moment,” we’re constantly looking behind and ahead, hoping to be happy in a future that never arrives. That isn’t just a line that sounds pretty; the future is just a thought. All you truly have is the present moment, and most of us spend all of our lives filling our present moment with thoughts of another time.
Halt
Imagine a rocking, blaring, dizzying concert. You’re one with the audience, an 800-limbed music-monster sweating and frothing and moving at the feet of the artists. Lasers and army searchlights sweep across it as it heaves all night under the line array speakers. Now imagine you could press pause and stop absolutely everything in time. Even the sound from the speakers halts in the air.
Imagine this moment. You can move freely. The intoxicating sensory overload stops and the people do too. You look around and see the sweat suspended from someone’s eyelash, the bared teeth of some woman barking a lyric, the backwards tossed head of the musician relishing the moment.
Rather than being in this moment, you’re observing it. Had you not paused it, you would have felt it, but by pausing it you are serenely above and outside the moment. This is meditation.
It’s coming above and outside your thoughts. You’ll know you’ve got there when you come out of it. “Oh woah, I just went away there,” you’ll say. You’ll start noticing your thoughts rather than feeling them. Remember above where I said that our thoughts define our feelings and that we don’t notice them, we just think them? In a meditative state, that isn’t true. They froth up out of consciousness, clearly labeled “anxious thought,” “sad thought,” “happy thought,” etc., and you watch them as they come and go.
In this emotionless state, you might start to experience clarity of thought. Ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to you while you were steeped in stress and anxiety might start to arise. “Take the job, you’ve always wanted it.” Thoughts become simply an object of consciousness like any outside input. This is being in the moment. It’s a reprieve from the incessant thoughts, and your anticipatory tendencies. It’s you, distilled.
