An agile variant of mindfulness
Deadly viruses aren’t the only things capable of modifying their survival strategies.
Humans are also equipped to revise their strategies for thriving to dramatically impact the future.
We all have the remarkable ability to track what’s happening in the present. We can call this mindful, situational, or real-time awareness.
It’s easy to take this faculty for granted and not realize how much it responds to consistent exercise.
Mindfulness exercises, when practiced habitually, allow us to upgrade our base level mindful awareness into a more robust capacity for resilience.
Attentional Fitness is a variant of mindfulness practice. It’s less contagious than more popular approaches, but it’s more compatible with the ways we live now.
Less contagious
Mindfulness isn’t about escaping life’s inexorable difficulties. As with other forms of contemplative practice, it has always been about attempting to inhabit our lives more fully. This requires honing skills for savoring the richness of ordinary moments and responding to discomfort and uncertainty with more internal composure.
To compete for the substantial meditation-app market share, the advertising of mindfulness emphasizes potential long-term outcomes while implicitly promising that our most stressful moments can be swapped for calm ones.
Although the intention is to provide on-ramps to more rigorous forms of the practice, selling a quick path to tranquility sets people up to define the practice too narrowly, misinterpret their practice efforts, and convince themselves they’re doing it wrong when relaxation isn’t available or even appropriate.
More adaptable
You can develop focus, emotional agility, and composure without relocating to pastoral or monastic settings.
While it will never be quick and easy to develop attention skills living in a society designed to exploit our attentional weaknesses, an Attentional Fitness approach to mindfulness prepares you to spot the endless opportunities for applying mindful habits in daily life.
When we abandon the goal of bliss on demand, we discover techniques that can be adapted for Zoom meetings, household chores, and navigating the choppy waters of news and social media.
Instead of waiting for ideal circumstances, we can expand our bandwidth for life’s inevitable challenges by modifying the ways we respond to what remains outside of our control.
Daron
