Almost everything, in life, is some sort of game or choreography.
Work, dating, socialising, travelling, investing, writing, buying coffee, driving, exercising, and basically any other activity you do every day, has a purpose. It has rules, it has winning and failing to some degree. It has success definitions.
All these things might be subtle, or ambiguous, but they’re there. You can say, “not me! I don’t care about promotions or making a lot of money at work.” Ok, fair enough. But maybe you care about stability, or being good at your trade, or having the satisfaction of having done something useful.
If you think hard and honestly enough, you can probably find some reason and some strategy to best fulfil that reason for most things you do (if you can think of an activity that is outside of this scope, I’d love if you could tell me below!)
Mindfulness is, to step out of the games.
You can’t win, at meditation. There’s no being better or worse than anyone else. You sit for a minute or ten at the sidelines of life as it happens, and just not play.
This is fucking hard.
Your brain is so good and so used to play games that it struggles not to play. Not to strategize the chessboard of your existence.
That’s where all the techniques come in. Focus on your breath. Repeat a mantra. Imagine light entering your forehead when you inhale. Whatever. They’re not the point: they’re just a distraction, so that you don’t go think about what’s the best chat line for that hot person you met is, or what is for dinner.
The way I like to do it, is to imagine pushing thoughts as they come behind a glass panel. Watch the game of games unfold in a shop window, or on a screen.
You don’t need to be good at mindfulness. In fact, if you think that way, you’re not doing it. Just be with yourself.
Sometimes, that’s all you got.
Sometimes, that’s all you need.