Comment 42 on Mindfulness

John said:

Using the feeds has the advantage of making it possible to respond on ones own personal news page and to maintain a dialog. I don't do that, and I should.

While I applaud your explanation of how to operate via RSS feeds, John, this all sounds far too clever for me - and I don't think we should all be staying inside our own patches anyway. And I don't think you should respond from the distance or safety of your own personal news page. To me, that would cease to be truest form of dialogue.

Sometimes the neatest solutions are the least practicable. Like the drawings of Escher. And a personal favourite of mine: how to reduce fixture congestion and abolish the problem of football violence by away supporters at a stroke. The answer is for all clubs not to travel to any of their away fixtures and only to play their home matches instead. The violent fans then stay at home and the number of games that each team plays is halved. Or should be in theory!

And if you think I'm way, way off topic here, I think the same principle applies to mindfulness. Tautological explanations may seems attractive and tidy, but they don't actually deal with mindfulness in the real world.

Working as a probation officer, there were always those who maintained there need never be a problem about how to deal with offenders who turned up late for an appointment, you simply sent them back to court for breach of their orders. "What if they are only five minutes late because their bus was delayed?" "Well that's their problem: they should have caught an earlier bus" etc etc. (And never mind the issue of prison overcrowding, just keep building more!)

Unfortunately, if their lives weren't already pretty chaotic, they probably wouldn't have offended in the first place. So how realistic is it to expect such individuals to be mindful enough to remember to catch an earlier bus, just in case it might be unexpectedly delayed.

I don't think there can be quick fixes and easy answers to the question of mindfulness in the real world. Staying on our own patch might avoid the embarrassment of finding that Linda's menu isn't exactly what our pre-conceived ideas might have told us to expect, but it fails to deal with the realities of a world in which we all have to interact, understand one another and appreciate our differences.