Mindfulness is no recent buzzword in the media. However, the popular practice persists and is still discussed by many. I initially disregarded the idea of noticing and actively processing your immediate surroundings as distracting and unfulfilling. The goal for mindfulness is to truly engage the senses with the environment and to note emotions, feelings, sensations, and thoughts happening in a present moment. This seemed idealistic, but I gave it a try. I began with meals: taking note of how I ate, what I ate, how enjoyable the meal was. Still, very little insight came from this practice. Am I really going to enjoy my life more by noticing how many seeds were in that orange? Mindfulness became mundane, pedantic, and seemed unnecessary. I began to doubt the power of being mindful daily.
That was until I began to realize just how much in life goes unnoticed. We've all done forgetful things: finding a cup of cold tea after we let it steep too long and promptly forgot we ever made a cup of tea. Forgetting where our car keys are placed. Bumping into objects because we never noticed there was something in the way. Forgetting someone's name literally just seconds after they announced it. Needing someone to repeat parts of a conversation because we were only halfway listening. Coming home at the end of a long day and just now feeling how tired our feet feel.
These are all outcomes of forgetting to notice the things present in the very moment in which you are living. They are innocent, daily distractions that shift our focus from what is currently happening. As a result, we never realize how tense our bodies are, how shallow our breaths are, even how we or others feel at any given time, and this robs us desperately from feeling life deeply. We become numb in a way.
There is a popular psychology belief about memory: we cannot recall what we do not encode. For example, many people will know that a penny of US currency will be copper, round, and with Abraham Lincoln on one side. But most have never noticed the specific details of a penny: which way is Lincoln's head facing? Where is the date and location of the penny's manufacture located? Something as simple, yet so common as a penny shows us how much we do not notice. We forget the common, everyday things that make up the majority of our life and remember either the outstandingly bad or outstandingly good experiences, despite the fact that those remarkable events actually compose very little of our lives.
We forget to pay attention to our breaths, our smiles, the way our voice sounds, the way we hold our bodies, and how different situations shape those aspects of our very lives and beings.
So if you do only one thing today, make sure you take time to notice and appreciate the most mundane things you may be overlooking. These are the things that will connect you to living in the moment.
