My sister was visiting at the weekend. While wandering around the city, I showed her my phone, and pointed out that it seemed to be prying apart on one side.

“I must have dropped it,” I said.

“Just get a new one,” she replied.

“NO! That’s why the world is in such a mess!” The strength of my reaction surprised me, and I apologised. I don’t like being too opinionated about things, but the constant product cycle upgrade madness our world is consumed by really gets my goat.

Every camera, smart-phone, tablet, laptop etc, is deliberately made out of date after a year, and we are mercilessly made to feel that our life will not be cool or worthwhile if we don’t keep up with the latest model.

We all know that, but what surprised me was when, a few days later, I was reading through a version of the Buddhist 5 Mindfulness Trainings – ethical guidelines for a happy, meaningful, life – and the theme cropped up again.

I read, “Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals.”

I’d always thought the bit about the minerals was a bit odd. But that’s what the product replacement cycle business is all about – minerals. Everyone on the planet has the right to upgrade their smartphone every year, but if we all do, how long will the mineral supplies last? Will there be any left for ten generations down the line? Even three?

It’s hard to write about this stuff without sounding like a smug eco-crusader (and I recently bought a new camera after all), but the fact is that I am writing on a 6 year old laptop, I have a four year old phone, and a twelve year old car. And they all work beautifully. They are good enough. Long may they last.

Note: I realised the next morning that this post is about mindful consumption – and I saw that we can be mindful not only of what we eat, and what we read or watch on the screen (the media we consume and its effect on us), but of the way we consume every type of natural resource – plants, minerals, animals – and even of how we consume other people’s time and energies.

If we are mindful of everything we consume, on so many of these levels, our health, and that of the planet and everyone else that inhabits it, will surely be in better shape now and going forward.

Yesterday I took the morning off – a luxury I’m very aware that as a self-employed person, I’m lucky enough to enjoy – and went up to the mountains for a walk up a steep hill.

On rare occasions I go up to the mountains on my own like this on a weekday morning – always when I’m feeling a little out of synch with the world, or moody, or something’s up and I can’t quite work out what it is, and I know that a few hours on my own in pure unadulterated nature will set me back on track again. Simply put, being alone in nature with no distractions is immensely healing.

It was just above freezing point, and a strong wind brought the wind-chill factor down by several more degrees. The sun was low in a bright blue sky, and there was snow on the ground. I set off up the hill into a low, leafless oak forest, the wind howling tremendously through the branches of the trees. I followed tracks in the snow – a fox?

I stopped where a break in the trees gave a view out over a valley, and then across a wide plateau to Madrid, far in the distance. Holding on firmly to an oak trunk, the wild wind seemed to pass right through me, the strong, low february sun lit up my face, and as every cell in my body seemed to leap into awareness, a powerful statement jumped to the forefront of my whole body and mind – “I – AM – ALIVE!”

Alive in a way you only every feel with nature all around you, alive in a way we all need to feel as often as possible – so how to feel alive? Disconnect. Get out to the countryside. No phone, not even a camera. Just me and the outside world. Not much can make you feel more truly alive than that, and transport costs aside – it’s free.

—

Something else happened up in the hills that day that I thought was interesting. When I parked my car in the car park where the trail begins, there was barely anyone else there. Just two other cars. No one around. Then another car turned up, and as I got out of my car, the young man in the other car got out of his. We eyed each other suspiciously…

In Steve Biddulph’s excellent book Manhood (I hugely recommended it to any men who feel a little lost sometimes as to their role/job/place in the world), he mentions how men typically view other men with huge suspicion – for example, if you are sitting on a park bench, and another man comes and sits nearby, our first reaction is often to think, “is this stranger a threat?” – I imagine this is even more the case for women.

I remembered this as me and the other guy in the car park looked at each other as we got our stuff together. We were both about to head off into the same empty wooded mountainside, and in my case I know that the old ‘fear’ habit had jumped right into my mind, a primordial reaction, weighing up a potential threat.

But for some reason I smiled, and called out, “Quite a wind isn’t it!”

“Certainly is!” he replied with a big grin, and said something else that was lost in the wind. Suddenly he looked like just a really friendly guy! We waved, and I set off up the hill. A few minutes later he caught me up, running up the hill in sports gear! He stopped for a moment to ask if I knew which way the trail went.

“I’m not sure, I think it just follows this old wall,” I said.

“Oh well,” he said, smiling again, “a la adventura!” (it’ll be an adventure!) – and he bounded off up the hill.

After my first instinctive smiling comment in the car park, fear of the other had changed to friendliness, and as I carried on up the mountain, I was following his happy footprints now as well as the fox’s. The adventurous runner. Another happy soul healing himself on the windswept mountainside.

Perhaps that helped make me feel so ALIVE that morning as well.

Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. Albert Einstein, The World As I See It.

If the present moment is all there is, why is it so difficult to be in it? It’s so crystal clear and perfect in its real, absolute stillness, but we get lost, we lose it… how can we lose something that is so directly at hand?

The past, the future – we are constantly dancing, or running, between one or the other, and the present moment doesn’t get a look in. Naked reality. If you stop for a minute and look at any inanimate object around you right now, just freeze and look at it without naming or judging it… What’s it doing? Just being present. It’s just there. Reality just sits quietly all around us.

Every morning I take my son to school and on the way we seen the moon, fading away as daylight creeps into the world. It gives me enormous solace to see the moon in the sky every day. The other day I realised, “It just sits there, in total peace, so solid,”  - ‘sailing in the sky of utmost emptiness…’ If you want to know what the present moment is like, you just have to look (really look!) at the peaceful stillness of the moon – or the branches of a tree described against the sky – the art of nature.

Or follow your breath… It took me years to realise how nice it is to follow your breath at moments in every day life. All the books I’d read and all the meditation retreats I’d been on, all telling me to follow my breath, and it worked pretty well there, but back in real life? Impossible… until recently, when I see how useful it is, always there, in and out, the perfect anchor, clearing the mind, bringing me back to my body… back to the present.

“Someone recently showed me the annual prospectus of a large spiritual organisation. When I looked through it, I was impressed by the wide choice of interesting seminars and workshops. It reminded me of a smorgasbord, one of those Scandinavian buffets where you can take your pick from a huge variety of enticing dishes. The person asked me whether I could recommend one or two courses. “I don’t know,” I said. “They all look so interesting. But I do know this,” I added. “Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever your remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it’s free.” Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

And what has the present moment got for us anyway? What is raw reality all about? I don’t know the answer to that! But by looking I get an inkling… a sense of wonder that can’t be described in thought. And peace. Above all I get a sense of peace. When I stop running, stop thinking about what to do next, what I did last, what happened in the past, what might happen in the future… all of those things are important – how else do we get anywhere or learn anything? – but we can’t be there all the time … it’s just exhausting.

Last summer in Plum Village on a meditation retreat, after two weeks of slowly slowing down, I was lying beneath a deep blue sky, by a big lake full of lotus flowers, when I read the following passage….

 ”Our true home is in the here and the now. The past is already gone and the future is not yet here. “I have arrived, I am home, in the here, in the now.” This is our practice. [...] Whether you are sitting, whether you are walking, whether you are watering the vegetables in the garden, or whether you are feeding your child, it is always possible to practice “I have arrived, I am home.” I am not running anymore; I have run all my life; now I am determined to stop and to really live my life.” Thich Nhat Hanh. No death, No fear

…and it was like a tidal wave washing over me… I realised that I had hardly ever, ever stopped in my entire life, and yet there was nothing I wanted to do more… just to stop running. Not to stop working, or growing, or learning, just to stop running, striving, searching, just to live in peace, just to live a little more in the now.

And as soon as I got home to Madrid, and the school run/work routine started, I was running again! I couldn’t believe it… but now, 6 months later, perhaps I am starting to slow down, sometimes. To go for more meditative walks in the park… to follow my breath every now and again… to take my tea away from the computer screen so I actually get to notice it… to learn something from the intense, wonderful, real presence of the moon every morning, and the tress so beautifully drawn in the park sky. They remind me: it’s OK to stop, it’s OK to slow down. It’s OK to live in the present. This is what it’s like – just peaceful, solid, wonderous, and free.

“Breathing In,
I have become space
without boundaries.
I have no plans left.
I have no luggage.

Breathing out,
I am the moon
that is sailing through the sky of utmost emptiness.
I am freedom.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Call Me By My True Names (from the poem, Breathing)

“If we know how to consume less, we don’t have to work as hard; we don’t need a bigger salary and a more expensive car to be happy. If we know the art of simple living, then we have much more time to live our lives happily and to help other people.” Thich Nhat Hanh, Answers from the Heart

I love that quote. The “art of simple living” just sounds more relaxing even before you start to live it! It makes me think of my “big TV buying” episode.

A few years ago we decided to get a new TV. I spent about a month scouring internet forums, reading reviews, agonising over which was the best TV to get. It nearly drove me mad. Seriously. I had to make the right decision. It seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Eventually, after many, many painful hours or research, the decision was made, and the big new flat-screen TV arrived.

Then I spent weeks (as I used to whenever anything new arrived) agonising over protecting it from damage, in this case from visiting kids for example, who would slap greasy hands on it!

Eventually, within about 18 months, the TV fell into disuse – after our son was born we had little time for watching TV – and eventually we just lost all interest in it. After a year of not having used it once, we decided that the big black empty panel in our living room wasn’t very pretty, and we gave the TV away to a relative last May.

All that agonising for nothing.

I’ve worked out that my life is much easier without too many new things, and the constant mind-bending search for them. The art of simple living…

Nothing beats a walk outside, or a quiet cup of tea.

My wife used to say to me, “you’re always saying you feel run down!” … whenever I told her I was feeling run down, which it appears, was about 3 times a week for a very long time. Usually this run down feeling was after I’d been on the computer for too long without a break, so though there was a clear cause, I read something one day that made me think there may be more to it than that:

“Always say, ‘I feel great.’ Never let thoughts of weakness enter consciousness.”  Mary Burmeister

This made me realise that I was doing exactly that – every time I said, “I’m feeling run down”, I was flooding my consciousness with this weak thought. I wondered if maybe it was my old friend ‘habit energy’ at work again. That the habit of saying it was making it more real, and that it was a habit I’d picked up from someone, somewhere in my past and just kept repeating.

So about a month before Christmas I stopped saying “I’m feeling run down,” and shortly afterwards, I stopped feeling it. I started to think, “I feel great!” more, and I started to feel that too.

Do I still feel bad after using the computer too much? Yes, but I know that the reason is simply that I’ve used the computer too much, and that this didn’t need to turn me into a run-down person, just a person that needs to manage his computer use better!

So to stop feeling run down, it seems I just had to stop saying it, and start to say the the positive opposite instead. It looks like it was just a bad habit I picked up or inherited along the way.

“Creas lo que crees” – You create what you believe (Spanish proverb).

 

I recently had one of my periods of disquiet where I’m not sure what on earth I’m doing with myself. I wonder whether I ‘should’ be spending my life dedicated to finding inner peace and being happy with quiet contentment, or working hard and if so how best to direct my work, and what on earth, in general, to do next! The usual result of non-stop thinking that on a good day I increasingly manage to recognise and smile at! Hurray for mindfulness!

But it did leave me wondering again how best to find a ’3rd way’, some perfect mix of being and doing, peace and action, that I still couldn’t put my finger on.

I recently wrote to a very nice lady who commented here on this blog a while back, asking for some wise words from her 73 years of experience on earth. She told me that for her true happiness is among other things a job well done and, not convinced by my idea of quiet contentment, that she never stopped exploring new ideas and small challenges.

This got me to re-evaluate a few ideas again.

I agree that quiet contentment on its own isn’t the way forward. I think the way, perhaps this ’3rd way’ I’m getting at, is to do things, to find and explore new experiences and to do good work (jobs well done as she said), but from a quietly contented inner space.

To follow whatever urges and inspirations drive us, but from a perspective of living in the present, rather than always thinking ahead to the future, or about what we’ll be able to show others we’ve done.

Action is important. I love it in The Artists Way when Julia Cameron talks about how she just ‘receives directives’ about what to do from her idea of God (‘The Great Creator’), and just does them without questioning. I’m doing that with this blog, and a couple of other projects, following inspirations.

But my biggest stumbling block is the need to trust uncertainty, or rather, to be able to live with uncertainty, but to press on with my projects while trusting that the Universe (or God, or whatever one calls it) knows where I’m going even if I don’t!

Life is about doing, about moving, about experience, but from a mindful place. Last night I listened to a bit more of the audio book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and he addressed exactly these points – work from a place of inner peace, from the present moment, let inspiration and enthusiasm guide you, and learn to trust even when you don’t know where you are going.

In the end, it’s about being at peace with uncertainty while at the same time trusting the Universe, or God or the cosmos, or whatever you want to call it, to work with us.

This ‘trusting the Universe’ while we live in these uncertain spaces, means stilling the mind. It’s only my thoughts after all, my ‘non-stop thinking radio’, that doesn’t feel comfortable and is afraid there. When the thinking stops, everything is fine. On I go, in peace. Things happen, work happens, life unfolds, and it’s a wonder to behold, a joy to take part in.

“With all this socially engaged work, first you must learn what the Buddha learned, to still the mind. Then you don’t take action; action takes you.” Thich Nhat Hanh, quoted in Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan.

Is that the key to my ‘doing vs being’ debate as well? You don’t ‘do‘ things just to get anywhere or gain anything in the future. Rather, you just ‘be‘, live happily in the present moment – “first you must learn to still the mind” – and once you are there, “you don’t take action; action takes you”: plenty of great ‘doing’ happens all on its own.

Highly Recommended Further Reading

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle – Chapter 9, Your Inner Purpose. (The whole book is excellent, I’ve added it to the Resources page, which is full of excellent recommendations to help with the stilling-the-mind element of all this).

Final thoughts on achievement…

…from Thich Nhat Hanh who, as author of over 100 books and head of monasteries in France, the US, Hong Kong and Thailand, knows a thing or two about it:

“There is not much we have achieved except some peace, some contentment inside. It is already a lot,” he says. “The happiest moments are when we sit down and we feel the presence of our brothers and sisters, lay and monastic, who are practicising walking and sitting mediation. That is the main achievement and other things like publishing books and setting up institutions like in Germany, they are not important.” Thich Nhat Hanh, from an excellent article in the Guardian.

Thank you for reading.

Someone asked me recently what I thought about following an alternative career path in life, and I told them about how while I’d been driving my son to school that morning, I’d looked out of the car window while we were stopped at a traffic light to see a woman entering an office building. “She’s got a real job, not like me,” I caught myself thinking – then I smiled, because it was about the millionth time I’d repeated that ridiculous idea to myself!

I quickly realised that all jobs are “real jobs” – the world needs painters and writers and poets and entrepreneurs just as much as it needs lawyers and architects and administrative staff and directors of big companies – each of which is a perfectly valid and great profession, and what I’d been brought up to consider a “real job”.

Nothing is better or worse, yet still the old received messages linger on in my 40-year-old head, “Get a real job… be resonponsible…” etc etc.

When my son started school 2 years ago we had to fill out a form that asked for our profession. I had absolutely no idea what to put. I run a small internet company with my wife, and write blogs. But I don’t really consider myself a businessman or a writer! So what to put? In the end I decided to stop overthinking it and did just put both: company director and writer – what a funny mix! But why not? Why do there need to be rules about this?

A friend I had a coffee with this morning is a painter and designs typography. He was saying how odd it sounded recently when someone he’d gone to school with had described himself as an ‘artist’ (that is was as funny as saying you were, for example, a ‘philosopher’), so I asked him how he described himself, and he said, as an ‘illustrator’, but that he’d spent most of the last ten years saying that word under his breath, as if it were a bad word – or an unworthy life pursuit. Finally he’d only recently got to the point where he could say it right out loud.

It’s amazing how these received messages about what the ‘right thing to do’ is take hold over us and can last a lifetime. And how hard it is to shake them off. For now I’m sticking with the idea I came away with as I watched that woman walk into the office building, to do her perfectly great job.

That her role is perfectly OK, but it’s also perfectly OK to be an artist, an illustrator, a writer, a photographer, a poet, a singer, a dancer, an explorer, an entrepreneur… imagine a world without any of those, and you’ve got all the justification you’ll ever need to take whatever path you like.