You all know of my fascination with the number 3.
I like to keep my To Do list at three, it feels digestible. The hobbit in me is horrified by three meals a day, but my shirts are begging me to cut second breakfast and elevenses, at least. Dinner OR supper? Ugh, fine.
Three is a mystical number—for good, and sometimes not—and when things show up à trois, I take note. I just hit another.
It has to do with the mindfulness movement, and the subtext of the words we chose—“alive” and “awake”—which suggests some people are sleepwalking through life and missing out the on the real stuff, the good stuff, the right stuff.
First, I noticed a variation of it in a passage from William Blake vs the World by John Higgs; and then another in a book on dialectical behavior therapy (DBT.) Most recently, it popped up in a Substack post about Vincent Van Gogh’s advice to his youngest sister, Wilhelmina. Ding, ding, ding!
Here, in Van Gogh’s own words, the passage that finally made me sit up and ring the bell:
[I]n order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself.
Others have mentioned this passage, Noted it, clucked and nodded their heads, oh yes—it’s a familiar trope.
Directed by Van Gogh at those Victorian prisses famously fussing over work, modesty, and imperialism, I wholeheartedly agree with the gist of his overall message—“Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little.”
But buried in there is this now rarely questioned assumption: when talking about slowing down, taking a breath, putting down your smartphone and looking around, we are throwing around these words and setting up a false dichotomy between living—and something else.
I’m starting to notice it everywhere.
This, for example, was that first, earlier passage which struck a discordant note, from John Higgs in William Blake vs the World—an otherwise excellent book about my favorite mystic:
We paint the world around us in the colours of the world inside. Just as the driver who complains about how bad the traffic was fails to recognise that they themselves were the traffic, so too do those who complain about being trapped in a terrible world fail to realise the extent to which their choice of focus has helped create that world. At stake is our experience of the precious, too-short span of years which we are lucky enough to have right here, right now, and which we can paint as either paradise or hell. This is one of our actions which we have to take responsibility for, and can’t blame others.
A certain wisdom, of course, but dealing out some subtly false choice between awake (paradise) or asleep (hell)—a little First Worldy, even—maybe a little dismissive. People can’t always respond to the circumstances of their lives as though they are different hats.
Who can say to a woman experiencing the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan that her misery is of her own choosing? No one of conscience, I hope. Are you going to tell the parents of a child gunned down in a school shooting that their grief is all just a question of outlook? Or a refugee from Syria to turn that frown upside down?
(“Certainly not!” we protest. “We don’t mean them! We mean…well, people who should be happy, relaxed, and cool—people who have no excuse! People like us, but not ‘awake’ like us. Them.”
Ah, yes—“them”—one of the most destructive four-letter words in the world; and “should”—that honorary four-letter word.)
It’s true we often have a choice over how to react to any given situation; that we can respond with dignity, vengeance, or anything in between; that we can heal, or we can lash out. And I believe in taking responsibility for our own lives, to the extent that is possible: no one else is going to do it for us.
But we live in a very complex web of relationships, power structures, political dysfunction, and unconscionable violence in this little old world of ours, and it’s a drastic oversimplification for someone to set up this polarity of “right action” where others are either walking with grace to the beat of our mindful drum, or flailing helplessly—pitiably—through life.
And you would think you might be safe from such cavalier treatment in the hands of a therapist…
I was recently lead to study DBT/dialectical behavior therapy, a therapeutic methodology based in mindfulness, and there it was again, in the definitive DBT Skills Training Manual. Dammit!
The author snuck it in early in the Mindfulness Skills chapter, without much fuss, you almost wouldn’t have noticed it:
“Mindfulness has to do with the quality of awareness or the quality of presence that a person brings to everyday living. It’s a way of living awake, with eyes wide open.”1
It IS sneaky, right, because talking yourself through the “quality” bit (quality can be a characteristic, not a measure of value—cool, cool) she slides in “living awake, with eyes wide open” while you’re distracted.
And she really rang my bell a little later:
“We can’t experience the past; we can’t experience the future; and if we’re living in the past or the future, we’re not really living.”2
Again, we get it—carpe diem and all that—but must the alternative to mindfulness be some kind of zombie existence, a living death? That’s not cool. (And frankly, I don’t believe that’s how it works—so often we stumble on beauty, grace and insight in our darkest and ugliest moments. It’s ALL life, every minute of it, for everyone everywhere—troubling, but true.)
What was intended to be a metaphor for a spiritual path (Buddha = the “Awakened” One) has been co-opted as a literal message, almost a recipe: Do this, not that, and true happiness awaits. (And the converse: you’re doing it WRONG!)
Lately, a million and one Happiness Experts are peddling some version of mindfulness which we ignore at our peril lest we be branded one of THEM: the anxiety-riddled, the over-achieving automaton, the confused and the deluded.
With us, or against us, folks: you’re either mindful, or mindless.
Let’s call it “awakeness” (cousin to “wokeness.”)
I find this same toxically positive anti-message sneaking into guidelines for good living all over the place, this subtle “or else” which finds it’s way into the mix, a bitter note, a looking down the nose at.
But what if someone is unaware of a tradition of mindfulness?
What if pugnacious and aggressive are good qualities where someone grew up?
Or perhaps they have an actual medical condition (because we so often, so easily, forget that anxiety, depression, alcoholism and other substance abuse and mental health problems are diagnosable illnesses) which prevents them from making the progress we expect them to achieve.
Is it our job to grade people’s lives based on the qualities of their experience? To run around with our camera phones at the ready, filming people having actual crises and mental health breakdowns to tut-tut over later in joyous condescension?
And this really has me reflecting because—in the People’s Republic of Ford—Life has taken many different twists and turns, and I have learned it’s not mine to judge, but to search for compassion, and hope—for peace, connection and healing.
What if… What if, rather than they/them, more of us started thinking in terms of us/we? WE are all in this together. WE can do better. WE are responsible for all of US, starting with ME.
A humble idea: Loving Kindness
Would it not be more accurate to say that, rather than wrestle happiness to the ground by hook or by crook—and judging others by how well or poorly they do the same—that our primary choice in life is whether we will treat ourselves and our fellow creatures with kindness?
I was introduced to the concept of loving kindness as taught by the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, and have found that in almost every instance of grievance, hurt feelings, or resentment, her simple and sincere mantra/wish that anyone (even me) “Be safe, be healthy, be happy, live with ease” has turned the dial in my own head from condemnation to compassion.
Salzberg makes the strong case that anger, hatred and antagonism all have suffering at their root, and in a world so rife with triggers and traumas many of us are spinning uncontrollably in confusion, turning our attention repeatedly back toward loving kindness—for ourselves, for everyone—and away from violence and aggression is an act both powerful and defiant.
Progress not perfection, of course, but it has been a source of profound relief to me. Why not? It’s a start, however small: one heart at a time, beginning with my own.
Linehan, Marsha M. DBT Skills Training Manual, 2nd Edition. Guilford, 2015, p. 151.
Ibid, p. 177.
Thank you Troy Ford. This fantastic article is a reminder and a call to do better, which I appreciate. As the pendulum tends to swing too far one way or the other we seem to have taken the human part out of being mindful. We may have forgotten that it is a luxury to have the time, health and inclination to contemplate the circumstances of our life. Folks living at, or below, the poverty line are in survival mode as are far too many people in bad circumstances around the world. Those of us teaching personal growth and all that stuff (me included) need to hold that front of mind and occasionally be called to question and reminded of the WE and that not everyone is in the same boat.
Also, I love that your fascinated by the number three!
“Would it not be more accurate to say that, rather than wrestle happiness to the ground by hook or by crook—and judging others by how well or poorly they do the same—that our primary choice in life is whether we will treat ourselves and our fellow creatures with kindness?” Love this. And we/us! Thank you for sharing. :)