“Mindfulness” is an oxymoron. The goal of mindfulness is to escape your mind, to escape, as much as you can, the thoughts that clutter your mind. So maybe we should call it mindfreeness, mindemptiness or even mindlessness, though that one has negative social connotations.
Of course, we need our minds to think up all the good stuff we want to think up: poems, solutions to the climate crisis, song titles.… But with mindfreeness, we can think those helpful thoughts when it is helpful to do so, and avoid obscuring them with thoughts about whether the plumber ripped us off two years ago, or whether we spoke too long to the barista.
Mindfreeness (or do you prefer “mindemptiness”?) is about returning as often as possible to the real moment that is happening and focusing your attention on that moment. Maybe that moment involves planning the future or imagining the plot of your novel. That’s fine as long as you retain the ability to return to what is really happening, what is real in the moment.
An advantage to bringing your attention back to the present moment is that you are concentrating energy that had been diluted in a million directions back to what’s going on, where your energy can be useful. It’s like the difference between scattering light all around and focusing a flashlight on something right in front of you.
