‘Mindful Awareness’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life

Sarah Luczaj takes a look at How to Cure Boredom, an upcoming e-book by fellow contributor Evan Hadkins.

How I eat at home now is quite different to how I ate when I was young. And yet, I don’t have a sense that my younger self wasn’t me — quite the opposite. The story of my learning which foods I like is “my” story.

It seems to me that we all have our ‘recipes’ for living: cooking with a recipe means handling standard ingredients in standard ways, and likewise we have relatively set routines for handling familiar situations. These ‘recipes’ can lead to very high standards of performance.

I prefer mindfulness over our usual experience. Others disagree: they advocate risk, ‘getting out of your comfort zone’, and so on.

At the moment my time horizon is short, and the longer view is decidedly fluid. I feel that I am in a place where I just need to go step by step, and this can have a heavy and plodding feel.