Mindfulness in the Moment

More often than not we try to make sense of things after the fact. Few people are more guilty of this than I. It is good to try and learn from our past experiences, our mistakes, and the mistakes and experiences of others. At the same time we definitely, at least I have a tendency to, take things to far in this regard. Between our narrative fallacies, our restrictive determinisms, our biases, we have a tendency to look too hard for answers and explanations when sometimes there simply isn't any. Our brains have a need for categorization because of its efficient nature. It is far easier for our brains to operate if everything is neatly placed into fileable categories. Unfortunately life is far from neat. The problem is that we do not live in a linear society as bad as our brains wish we did. The randomness in our lives that is far more common than we care to acknowledge or admit is simply just that, randomness. There may come a time in the future with the aid of supercomputers where we can pinpoint with surgical precision the cause and effect of some things but in all reality we are far from that. This doesn't mean there aren't things we can't improve and better understand, far from it. We simply should work on shifting our focus on the present, the moment at hand. Looking at our behavior in the moment and making adjustments on the fly will reap far more benefits than ruminating about the past trying to make sense of it. This approach requires a mindfulness that we have to practice and develop. We can learn a lot from animals in this regard. They live in the moment. They don't possess the capacity like we humans do to examine things in the moment so they are not as capable as we are to make these adjustments on the fly. We can do wonders for the quality of our lives and how we experience our lives, what we can achieve and much more if we take time to become more mindful and make adjustments to our behaviors in the present.



#elliotyi
#paradigmleft
#habits
#mindset