Mindfulness: More Important Today than Ever
Author: Lionel Fisher

Remember, counsels Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, that this moment is the only time over which you have dominion. The most important thing in your life, therefore, is the thing you are doing at the moment. The most important person in your life is the person you are with at the moment.

And if you’re alone, it follows, you must minister wholly and lovingly to yourself.

Mindfulness, Hanh calls it: an acute, constant awareness of everything we do, whether the act be grand, routine, or inconsequential—each moment we are doing it.

And his tao of now is more important than ever in the tragic wake of the September 11 bombings.

Time is not something we can hang on to, David Steindl-Rast reminds us. "It is a gift we receive moment by moment."

Whatever you are doing, therefore, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are feeling becomes of crucial importance at that moment, says the Benedictine monk.

Wherever you are standing becomes holy ground. When you stand at the kitchen stove, the stove becomes your altar. When you lie on the bed, the bed becomes your altar, says Steindl-Rast.

Now now now now now. This is mindfulness, this is its mantra. Helen Ng practices mindfulness by pretending that everything she does she is doing for the very last time.

“I tell myself as I’m talking to someone that this is the last time I’ll see or hear or speak to that person again,” says the forty-six-year-old pharmacist.

“Or this is the last time I’ll be visiting this place or experiencing this particular pleasure. This is the last chance I’ll have to do whatever I need to do. Or say whatever I need to say. I remind myself that when this time passes, when this person leaves, when this chance is gone, it will never come again.”

It’s her way, she says, of not collecting any more regrets. “By thinking to myself this opportunity may be the last, I won’t wait until it’s too late.”

For what? “For whatever,” she replies. “To say thank you. Or ‘You did a good job.’ Or ‘You were right and I was wrong.’ Or ‘I’m sorry.’ Or ‘I love you.’ Whatever.”

Pretending that each act, each event, each encounter, each occurrence could be the last makes nothing too trivial to put off, Ng says.

“How many people,” she asks with a sad smile, “allow their precious moments to pass because they think they’ll have others just like them? Too many of those moments don’t ever come again—and they are the stuff regrets are made of.”

Listening to Ng, I sense some of those lost moments were hers, and brought her to where she is today: totally centered in the present.

"Hold every moment sacred," exhorts Thomas Mann. "Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment." For one simple reason. You may not get another.








--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lionel Fisher is the author of "Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude" (Beyond Words Publishing, Spring 2001), which records the emotional and spiritual triumphs of men and women who have found amazing grace alone. Fisher alos writes a self-syndicated newspaper column, "SINGLES SCENE: The Art of Being Alone." Reach him at llf@centurytel.net

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------