He starts off boldly: "It's no longer good enough to live in a way that you're happy with and doesn't enrage others. No. We're now supposed to live in the moment. It's not enough to work towards being happy later, you have to be happy now. Right now! Not soon, but now." Then he steps back a little and adds "OK, maybe not all the living-in-the-momenteers are saying that's the only way of being happy"... "They're recommending this as a way to become happy. Are they mad?"
As I said, provocative! I guess I can count myself as a living-in-the-momenteer. Am I saying that? Well, yes.
He goes on to describe why he thinks we're mad. And this is where he gets a bit confused about what it means to 'live in the moment'. "The ranges of pleasures", he says, "to someone living in the moment is both small and bestial. Unless you're in the middle of something delicious, intoxicating, carnal, or having a sneeze, you're stuck. And the only one that doesn't involve any forethought at all is sneezing...".
Here, I think is the crux of the matter. Can you plan for the future whilst living in the moment? As I see it, it's all to do with how you approach things. You can make plans whist fully being in the present moment.
Let's take dinner tonight as an example.
Approach 1: I anticipate I will feel hungry. I predict I'm going to want to eat lasagne but I know I don't have all the things in my kitchen that I'll need to cook it. I make a list of what I need and plan which shop(s) I'll go to. I get home and start cooking, all the time worrying whether it'll turn out ok, whether I've got the bechamel sauce the right consistency, etc. I finally sit down to eat the lasagne, fantasising about how tasty it's going to be. I start eating, enjoy it for about 5 seconds, then start replaying in my head a conversation I had with someone earlier, planning how I'm going to advertise my yoga classes better, etc. I think about how I might improve the lasagne next time, how much washing up my cooking has generated, or what I might have for dessert. Afterwards I might think back and remember how nice the lasagne was.
Which approach do we take most days?
This quality of flow deserves a moment to think about. It's a fairly elusive state. As with sleep, you can't just will yourself into it - all you can do is create the right conditions and let it happen. Like trailing your hand in the cool water of a stream, it's very pleasant but as soon as you try to grasp it you come up with nothing. It also embodies an apparent paradox: how can I be living in the moment if I'm not even aware of the moment? David Mitchell highlights this as a weakness of mindfulness practice. However, spiritual practice is full of apparent paradoxes. When you're in that flow, does the paradox still exist?
"But what about anticipated pleasure?" David Mitchell asks. He gives the example of watching the 2001 film Mulholland Drive, "believing he was enjoying watching the film and anticipating an ending that would resolve and make sense of the mystery". However, because there was no such ending he said he was forced to "retrospectively downgrade what he thought had been his enjoyment in the moment." This made me chuckle!
Another example he gave was sport. The games you enjoy most at the time, he suggested, are the "ones where the teams or people you're rooting for go into the lead early and stay there until they win." But in hindsight, the ones you enjoy most are "where it's touch and go for the whole game then they win." He explains that his dominant emotion at the time of watching is "I really hope they win so it will turn out later that I'm enjoying myself now".
But all this hinges on the attachment to an outcome, and this is the fatal mistake we all make time and time again. Is enjoyment only to be derived from a win? If you're trapped in thoughts of the future we forget to experience (let alone enjoy) what's happening right now. Aren't there enjoyable moments in a game regardless of who's winning? And why on earth would you "retrospectively downgrade" your enjoyment of a film just because it didn't end in a way you wanted it to?! That is mad! Ironically, letting go of what you want is the only way to find the benefits of mindfulness.
David Mitchell ends by concluding that "all enjoyment is a variation on a theme, which is chores now for jam tomorrow." Nice one-liner! But I'd say the essence of mindfulness is really to be present with your chores. Enjoy them, savour the smell of freshly laundered clothes, the gliding motion of the iron, let yourself disappear into the rhythmic backwards and forwards of the cleaning cloth in the bath. Don't worry about the jam - it might or might not come. But doesn't the wonder of how the water flows over the colourfully dirty dishes outweigh any potential future possibility of jam?
For some great further reading, have a look at this lovely article in Psychology Today The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment
Or this article in the Guardian Living in the moment really does make people happier
(or sign up to one of my courses on mindfulness! www.youruniverseyoga.co.uk/mindfulness)
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