Last year, I successfully spent ten minutes each day setting up a mindfulness practice, or at least the beginning of one. Well, here’s what Marina Benjamin, in her brilliant kind-of memoir, “Insomnia,” thinks of my efforts:
I have long believed that mindfulness has its limitations. It overvalues the present moment and neglects the way the human mind wants to knit together past and future, lived experience and speculation, so creating conditions for narrative thinking or autobiographical orienteering. With its resolute and faithful focus on a single object of thought, or on doing away with thought altogether, mindfulness is about as edifying as praying to a toilet roll.
And again:
I have come to the conclusion that mindfulness is much like tidying the house. It is focused and satisfying in concentrated spurts, but it lacks a direction of travel. It seeks to keep things as they are. It leaves the world unchanged.