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One of the greatest challenges, and one of the greatest joys, of being a householder, a practitioner of insight meditation living in the everyday world, living in New York City, is to find a way to align our meditative practice, our dharma path, with the complexities and extraordinary pace of contemporary urban life. The fact is, we have busy, full, often complicated lives. And the fact is, we often don’t take the time to be mindful, we often don’t give priority to mindfulness. It frequently seems that our time for mindfulness, for being awake, is confined to the thirty or forty minutes when we sit "on the cushion" in the morning … and that the remainder of the day consists of an endless sequence of activity in which we’re not inclined at all to mindfulness. In essence, we may start the day off well … but we drop the practice. Somewhere during the course of things, it vanishes. Mindfulness is no longer a priority. It’s sometimes said that it’s not hard to be mindful, but that it’s hard to remember to be mindful. The suggestion being that we forget. Rather than forgetting, I think that our problem, mostly, is that we don’t make the effort. We simply don’t make the effort. We don’t place sufficient priority on mindfulness, on our minds. With the advent of the new year, the tendency, of course, is to make resolutions, and the subtext of these resolutions, more often than not, is, "What can I add to my life?" A new job? A new partner? A new apartment? Knowledge about something? Another spiritual practice? Instead of adding, perhaps what we need most is to subtract. Perhaps what we need is less time for doing things, adding and getting, and more time for doing nothing. This, it seems, might be a priority to strongly consider: creating more time for doing nothing. We need the space in which to strengthen our mindfulness, to pay attention. A good practice for each of us is to create some time every day, perhaps different intervals of time, five minutes here and there, a short walk in the park, even just thirty seconds of silence sitting at our desk, to "check in." To bring ourselves back to the present moment. Can we take time every day to stop, pause, and be here? In these intervals, we can do several things. We can, quite simply, be present, know the happiness of unfettered presence. We can reflect on our intention for ourselves, our lives; are we in alignment with our wish to be happy? Or we can reflect on a theme, the truth of life’s brevity, the truth of our suffering. Practicing in this way, we learn to give priority to the mind and heart. And what greater priority can there be?
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