The danger of mindfulness is that by drawing our attention to the present moment, the past and future may get relegated too far into the background. What lies behind and before us matters: as with riding a bike, while it can be refreshing to focus on feeling the breeze on your face, it’s useful to know if there is a double-decker bus just behind you or if there’s a traffic light up ahead. Mindfulness might encourage us to notice our current thoughts and feelings more clearly, and produce space for reflection, but we will always need guideposts based on our past experiences, and future goals or desires, to help us make choices and live a life of meaning.
This is one of the major discoveries of the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, many of whose insights came from his experiences in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. It is worth exploring his work in some detail, as it raises serious questions about the priority that mindfulness gives to the present.
Frankl, who died in 1997, invented a therapeutic approach known as ‘logotherapy’ – a name based on the Greek logos or meaning. In contrast to Freud’s belief that we are motivated by the ‘pleasure principle’, Frankl argued that human beings are ultimately seekers of meaning rather than pleasure. A person finds meaning, he says, when ‘he commits himself to something beyond himself, to a cause greater than himself’. He quotes the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers who wrote, ‘What man is, he ultimately becomes through the cause which he has made his own.’29 Frankl referred to this cause as a ‘concrete assignment’, a task or project that directs our minds forward in time toward something that matters deeply to us. It might be designing a new kind of space telescope, campaigning against biodiversity loss, running a semi-professional choir or caring for an ailing parent. Whatever the cause, its purpose is to act as an existential compass, orienting the direction of our future choices and actions – helping us decide what to seize when we seize the day.
Frankl’s theory has a long intellectual pedigree. Aristotle, for instance, recognised that each of us should have ‘some object for the good life to aim at… since not to have one’s life organized in view of some end is a mark of much folly’.30 Frankl’s originality was to discover this first-hand in what he called the ‘living laboratory’ of the death camps.31 He noticed that dedication to a cause or project not only ensured that people stayed in good mental health, but that it literally kept them alive. He gave the example of a scientist who wanted to commit suicide: Frankl helped him see that it was worth staying alive to finish writing the series of books he had started before the war – a task that could not be completed by anybody but himself. Having that future goal gave the scientist an inner strength that became a means of survival. In the camps, those without such a ‘will to meaning’ frequently killed themselves, or succumbed more quickly to disease. It wasn’t so much being physically robust that determined whether people would live or die, but whether they had identified a cause that allowed them ‘to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom’.32
He offered other powerful examples outside the extreme context of the war. Frankl pointed out that even when Goethe was extremely ill and close to death, sheer force of will kept him alive for seven years until he finished writing the second part of Faust. Two months after completing the manuscript, aged eighty-two, he died. Goethe’s mission kept his heart beating, and once he had achieved it he was able to let go of life.33 We often observe a similar phenomenon when an elderly person dies soon after their husband or wife has passed away: once their most meaningful relationship disappears, so does their will to live.
Frankl also believed that we should endeavour to find meaning in our suffering. He cites the case of a woman who attended one of his group therapy sessions in Vienna after trying to kill herself. One of her sons was confined to a wheelchair, and her other son had just died, aged only eleven. Frankl first asked a different, thirty-year-old woman in the group, to imagine being on her deathbed at eighty, having lived a childless life full of financial success and social prestige. This young woman described how her life had been replete with luxury living and amusing flirtation but was ultimately lacking in substance. ‘My life was a failure,’ she concluded. He then asked the mother of the disabled boy to imagine herself looking back aged eighty. Through tears she described how she had done her best to look after her son and made a fuller life possible for him. ‘My life was no failure!’ she declared. Frankl’s observation was this: ‘Anticipating a review of her life as if from her death bed, she suddenly was able to see a meaning to her life, a meaning which even included all of her suffering’.34 For Frankl, this kind of example revealed that while we can’t always change our circumstances or eradicate our suffering, we have the power to choose the attitude that we take to them.35 That’s what freedom and responsibility are really all about.
I am convinced that Frankl, were he alive today, would have been a vocal critic of mindfulness. Why? Because it orients the mind toward the present and away from future goals that can contribute to and enhance meaning.36 ‘Logotherapy focuses rather on the future,’ he wrote, ‘that is to say, on the assignments and meanings to be fulfilled’.37 Frankl would also have been wary of the way mindfulness puts emphasis on bringing us into a state of peaceful inner calm, where our anxieties about the past and future float away. He was a firm believer that we absolutely need tension, challenge and a certain amount of anxiety and suffering in our lives. It is the struggle to close the gap between where we are today and future objectives beyond the self that we wish to achieve that can give life its meaning. A concrete assignment provides a reason to get out of bed in the morning, even if pursuing it isn’t always pleasurable in any obvious sense. Without such tensions we might find ourselves in what he called an ‘existential vacuum’.38 A state of serene calm can actually become a void where we have nothing to strive and struggle for, and so we become starved of meaning.
Proponents of mindful presence might reasonably counter that they are not completely dismissive of the past and future, but rather believe we should simply put more emphasis on living in the moment, especially in our high-speed world of digital distraction.39 ‘Make the Now the primary focus of your life,’ suggests spiritual thinker Eckhart Tolle, ‘have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to the past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation’. In other words, we might need the past to remember what to buy from the supermarket, and the future to plan when to go shopping, but beyond their use for such everyday functions, neither should be considered a route to spiritual sustenance. In fact, as Tolle explains, they should be primarily seen as a source of ‘pain, dysfunction and sorrow’. It is only in the present that we can realise our ‘true nature’.40 I consider such a view to verge on extremism. Frankl, for instance, shows us just how powerful the future can be as a wellspring of meaning in our lives. We need to find a healthy mix between dwelling in the past, present and future, not make any one of them our singular object of adulation.
Am I saying that we should refrain from practising mindfulness and bringing ourselves into the present? Not at all. Mindfulness has plenty going for it: it can be good for our mental health, offer us the headspace to clarify a concrete assignment that can give our life direction and meaning, and bring an awareness and attention to the way we make carpe diem choices in our lives. But it is not the answer – or at least not the only answer – to the great question of life, the universe and everything.
THE LOST VARIETIES OF NOW
Exuberance: Unleashing a Lust for Life
Who can forget the opening of The Sound of Music? Even if you find the film sentimental and saccharine, you can probably recall Maria, the postulant nun, swirling with exuberant delight in the Austrian Alps, singing her heart out about the hills being alive with the sound of music. Lost in song, she eventually hears the distant ringing of convent bells and rushes back late for mass. Her superiors are not amused, and she is hauled in for an audience before the bo
ss, the Reverend Mother. Maria explains how she just couldn’t help climbing up the Untersberg, lured by the fragrant green slopes and blue sky, and singing as she went.
What’s Maria’s problem – at least from the perspective of the nuns? It’s her natural and almost uncontrollable exuberance. Rather than adhering to the convent rules and immersing herself in a mindful state of Christian prayer, she is bursting with energy and excitement, and can’t help losing herself in the moment, in the beauty of the mountains, the sky, the birds, in life and laughter. Maria’s joie de vivre gives her an extraordinary capacity for being in the now, but it’s a version of being present that is very different from the poised calm of mindful breathing or a composed and contemplative session of what is known as ‘walking meditation’.
What, exactly, is exuberance? According to clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, ‘exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion… certainly it is no lulling sense of contentment: exuberance leaps, bubbles and overflows’.41 It is an aliveness and passion for life that is more energetic than joy but less intense than ecstasy. The exuberant amongst us are the embodiment of enthusiasm, in the original Greek sense of en theos, having a god within. Not that this is always a good thing, notes Jamison. If everyone was continually exuberant all of the time, ‘the world would be an exhausting and chaotic place, driven to incoherence by competing enthusiasms’.42 You can’t have too many Marias on the scene.
For Jamison, exuberant individuals represent a particular personality type, making up an estimated 6 to 10% of the general population.43 It’s a mostly innate trait or disposition, closely related to extraversion (and in some cases bipolar disorder). You can’t take a course in exuberance as you can with mindfulness: either you’ve got it or you haven’t. She cites many character examples, from the naturalist John Muir to the physicist Richard Feynman, from Toad of Toad Hall to Snoopy. One of her favourites is US President Theodore Roosevelt. He had an irrepressible zest for life and was always speaking with great animation, bursting into roars of laughter every five minutes. He could often be found racing around the White House with his children, chasing them and their ponies up and down the marble stairs. ‘You must always remember,’ said one British diplomat, ‘the President is about six’.44 Like Maria von Trapp, Roosevelt had a carpe diem lust for life, a capacity to squeeze everything he could out of each moment.
Too often today the idea of being present is simplistically equated with the stillness of mindful awareness. Exuberance is a reminder that mindfulness has no monopoly on bringing us into the here and now. Yet there are further varieties of now we should learn to appreciate, which tap into other parts of the human psyche and may leave different traces of meaning on our lives. So what alternatives are available, especially if we don’t happen to have an excitable inner Maria ready to surge out of us? The surfing fraternity might offer some help.
Flow: Stepping into the Zone
Surfers have a deeply attuned sense of being in the now. Their descriptions of what it feels like to ride a wave – especially a tough one – typically overflow with the language of presence:
When you surf the best, you are in the zone. You are there alone. It is you, the wind, the waves, the salt in your mouth and the vision of the bumps and the chops and the sucking phase. There is nothing else there. There is nothing else in your mind. There is nothing else that matters. For a moment in time, time stands still.45
When you’re on a wave, time ceases to exist, and you’re in such an intense combined state of euphoria, peace, presence and excitement that it’s something you have to return to over and over again… If there’s anything that surfing teaches you, it’s how to be present.46
These surfers, perhaps without realising it, are describing a phenomenon that psychologists call ‘flow’. This is when you become so absorbed in an activity that neither past nor future seem to matter, and you are completely and unselfconsciously immersed in the present. All sense of time disappears and whatever it is, you are just doing it. We have a colloquial term for this state: being ‘in the zone’. You might experience it when involved in an intense and energetic football game, or playing guitar in the pub, solving a Sudoku, or conjuring up a five-course dinner for friends. For more than four decades the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has studied flow amongst a wide range of people, including basketball players, surgeons, rock climbers, chess players and concert pianists (though not, to my knowledge, surfers). He noticed that there is a trick to getting into flow: you need to be engaged in an activity that is not so easy that it makes you bored, but not so difficult that you become anxious about failure. An element of challenge or risk is part of the mix. In other words, you’ve got to be a bit out of your comfort zone to get into the zone.
Laird Hamilton, one of the greatest ‘big wave’ surfers of all time. This doesn’t look like any meditation class that I’ve ever been to.
Csikszentmihalyi believes that flow is as good a proxy as any for ‘happiness’ or what he prefers to call ‘optimal experience’. Apart from being engrossed in the moment, those in flow report that it has other tell-tale signs: you feel in control of your own actions, experience a sense of exhilaration and also of transcendence, you are displaying mastery of a skill, and the activity is done for its own sake rather than as a means to an end. Alas, I cannot claim familiarity with this checklist as a result of my surfing prowess, which unfortunately failed to appear during the surfing lesson I had as research for this book. But as an addict of the obscure medieval game of real tennis – an indoor sport played with bent racquets that is a combination of regular tennis, squash and chess – I know just what it’s like to be in flow.47 I enter the now not through quiet meditation but by diving through the air reaching for a backhand volley. I feel not so much that I am living in the moment, but that the moment is an impulse surging through me, fusing mind and body into a single instant of time. Being and doing collapse into one another. Of course, I can only write this description after the fact. While I’m in the middle of a rally (which real tennis players perversely call a ‘rest’) I’m not consciously thinking or feeling anything at all. I’m just hitting the ball.
How does this help us understand the varieties of now? One of Csikszentmihalyi’s key points is that, contrary to popular opinion, these moments of optimal experience ‘are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times’. In fact, ‘the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.’48 As with Viktor Frankl’s idea of the concrete assignment, the actual experience itself will not always be pleasurable: your body might be aching or your brain twisted in knots. But you will nevertheless have a profound feeling of carpe diem aliveness. Don’t worry, be happy? Csikszentmihalyi would beg to differ. Enjoying an engaged and fulfilling life is not a matter of getting rid of worries or entering a state of inner stillness. Rather, it is about riding a challenging wave that requires every ounce of attention and focus you have to avoid a wipeout, while still being able to enjoy the thrill. That’s what it takes to get the high that surfers call being ‘stoked’.
Wonder: Being Stirred by the Universe
Alongside exuberance and flow is a more primordial route to the now: wonder. The word ‘wonder’ goes back to Old Norse, but its precise etymology is unknown. Its elusive origin is appropriate, for wonder itself often seems somehow beyond our grasp. We associate it with being in a state of awe or astonishment. There is something that arrests us, that seizes us, that holds us in the present with its immensity, beauty or mystery. I’ve felt wonder gazing into the vast silent chasm of the Grand Canyon, when surrounded by a fever of stingrays undulating past me in the Great Barrier Reef, staring up at the Eiffel Tower as a stupefied six-year-old, and studying the tiny, perfectly formed hands of my daughter just a few seconds after she emerged from the womb.
We know wonder when we experience it, but putting it into words is another matter. I could try to de
scribe a profound moment of wonder when I was seventeen, standing alone on a mountainside in the Himalayas: I felt so tiny and insignificant in relation to the endless huge peaks before me, and I suddenly understood that my own problems were petty and insignificant compared with those of the world. Yet this does not come close to capturing that instant of awareness and the lasting effect it has had on me. Conveying wonder requires a poetic sensibility, which may be why the Romantics were amongst its most fervent and successful early apostles.
One of them was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Especially in his twenties – before he was consumed by opium – Coleridge’s greatest addiction was the natural world of mountains and valleys, woods and seas, or as he once wrote, a ‘sycamore, oft musical with bees’. He embarked on gigantic walks (often with William Wordsworth) that sparked his poetic imagination and filled him with the awe and wonder of creation. During a solo tour of the Lake District in August 1802, as he strode across the fells he was confronted by scenes that were ‘heart-raising’ and ‘wild as a dream’. His descent from the peak of Scafell Pike produced an effect of ‘almost religious intensity’, according to one biographer.49 To make his way down, Coleridge ignored the careful pathways and picked his own near-vertical route, dropping down seven-foot ledges at full stretch. He soon landed on a narrow ledge that was too high and dangerous to descend, but from where he could no longer climb back up. He was trapped on the cliff-face. While most people would have panicked, for Coleridge it turned into a moment of ecstatic union with the raw majesty of nature. ‘My limbs were all in tremble,’ he recalled. ‘I lay upon my back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my custom to laugh at myself for a madman, when the sight of the crags above me on each side, and the impetuous clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic trance and delight, and blessed God aloud.’50 He eventually managed to escape by wedging himself between two rock-faces and descending to safety. The Lake District’s Fell & Rock Climbing Club now celebrates Coleridge’s adventure as England’s first ever recreational rock climb.
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