Mindfulness: Zero cache, totally metal

I go through my morning on autopilot, navigating the kitchen without thought. I know this routine and I know how to porridge without incident and which direction the kettle is going to dribble in.
So I am not paying attention. Automatic motor skills are seeing me through.
The first stage of mindfulness is to notice the thoughts passing through. The second stage is to set these thoughts aside for a moment. I am still driving the microwave, but I try to notice what my brain is doing.
My brain goes completely silent. Like a cat presented with a microphone, getting any sound out at all is an exercise in futility.
“Notice your thoughts.”
My brain looks at me with inscrutable majesty. I am not having any thoughts! I gaze at the landscape of my mind, arid and dusty as the plains in a cowboy film, a lone tumbleweed thought drifting across the scene. I have nothing to set aside!
“I am amazing at this.”
This stage doesn’t last. Thoughts are sneaky. They wait for me to look away from the mindfulness and then they sidle. It is moments later that I am thinking about my reasons for attempting this, and wondering how I am doing.
But this doesn’t count as thinking because it is about mindfulness, right?
I wonder how long all this will take to have an effect. I focus on my breathing, and then plan lunch.
Quieting the brain is hard work. Right now I am managing a few seconds at a time of setting my thoughts aside, and the process of trying to sit still for even five minutes and be present causes my brain to squirm like a cat in a jacket.
Evidence shows that spending time in the present moment is mentally good for us. This requires repeated tiny moments of focus throughout the day. We have to notice our thoughts, interrupt them, and become aware of the present moment. This is extremely difficult.
Worse, it has zero cache.
Society is set up to appreciate feats of strength and bravery.
Our willingness to celebrate achievements relates almost directly to how physically impressive they are. Run 5km? Family will come out if they live nearby, but they might be tetchy about it. Run a marathon? Strangers will applaud in the street.
One of the worst aspects of mindfulness, besides the lack of a cool name?
It is as hard as training for a marathon but no one gives us props for it
We are culturally conditioned to be impressed by people who can run down a buffalo but not by people who can repeatedly perform tiny acts of awareness throughout their day.

Which is dumb, because primitive humans would have been stuffed if they hadn’t been good at doing small repetitive tasks.
Without camp tending and looking out for predators everyone would have been eaten by tigers while on fire.
We ought to be celebrating this kind of exertion. We should rock up to the kitchen with a swagger.
“I just spent thirty seconds mindfully noticing a tree. For the eighth time today. I am on a ROLL.”
There should be high fives and admiring glances. Someone should immediately bring us a beer.
Instead, we have to bench press our own brains without any ego massage to help us along.
So I guess I just want to plant a flag in appreciation of the hard graft of building a Mindfulness practice.
This is the unassisted chin up of the self care world. It’s the 22km training run in the rain, the two hundred individual hand sculpted scales made for a loved ones dragon shaped birthday cake. It’s the one hundredth Spanish class where I want to take a tambien, whatever that is and throw it out of the window. It’s work that has no progress bar, no clear end point and no applause. If we are going the right way it will make us stronger, warmer, more generous, a gift to ourselves and those around us. But there is no finish line, no “tada!” moment where someone blows out the candles or we duck for someone to put a medal over our heads. A lot of the time it feels like it’s not working.
If you are doing this work, I am standing on the pavement with a hand drawn sign and a bowl full of jelly beans screaming at you.
“YES! YOU ARE DOING THE THING! IT IS AMAZING!”
I will jump up and down for no discernible reason beyond the excitement at seeing you doing the Mindfulness and because I know your jumping up and down muscles may be tired, from all the focusing.
I won’t shout that you are nearly there because we both know there is no “there” exactly. That’s what makes it so hardcore.
We keep moving and trying and shushing and noticing and showing up, and this is absolutely the most metal thing since the train chase in Wallace and Gromit.