It’s tempting to see life as one big project, because what is life full of? Projects.

Making dinner is a project. Finding love is a project. Getting a job is a project. Retiring is a project.

And what’s inside any project? Smaller projects. 

To make dinner you have to pick a recipe. Small project. Go food shopping. Small project. Chop the ingredients. Small project.

Improving our situation in any way, big or small, requires finishing a project.

If we’re hungry and want to enjoy that nice dinner we’ve started cooking, we’ve got to finish the project of cooking it. If we’re not happy with our home or our job, we’ve got to finish the project of finding a new one. Want to go on vacation? Planning it is a project and that project has to get done.

Life trains us to expect that happiness, relief, success, lies at the other end of a project because so often that’s true. In part.

No matter what our values and goals happen to be, no matter what kind of projects we choose to undertake, we’re still looking for gratification at the other end of a project, and sometimes we find it. In part.

One person’s current project might be selecting and acquiring a luxury wristwatch that they don’t urgently need because they have ten others. Another person’s project might be learning to play a beautiful passage on an old guitar that they had salvaged from a junkyard and painstakingly restored. To judge these two projects, one might seem like a greed-driven consumerist project, and the other might seem like a wholesome effort involving the cultivation of skill through dedicated practice, but there’s something the same about them: in both cases, gratification, contentment, satisfaction is imagined at the other end. I’ll be happy when I get that watch. I’ll be happy when I can play that beautiful passage.

To finish projects and acquire the rewards we seek, we have to stay focused on the goal. We have to maintain our pace in moving towards completion. We have to be an effective taskmaster.

Putting all this together, it’s easy to think that our current situation in life is synonymous with the state of our to-do list.

Our to-do list might have entries relating to each of the active projects in our life at the moment. That list represents everything we want to do, everything we have to do, everything we care about, everything we hate – it’s a picture of how we’re going to be spending our time in the coming days, weeks, and months. If life is indeed a project, then our to-do list is a reading of our life circumstance – it’s an indicator of how the project of our life is going right now.

And if that list is overwhelming and chaotic we might think that our life itself is in chaos, or somehow “off track.”

Naturally, the way to get our life back on track would be to get a grip on that to-do list, put the items in order and start checking them off faster.

When I see a burdensome task on my list, I sometimes think “I’ll feel better when I get this done.” And that has always seemed like a helpful thought, the kind of thought I’d want to cultivate, since it might motivate me to finish.

Similar to the project-oriented view of life is a game-oriented view. We might see life as a game where our current status depends on how many good things versus how many bad things have happened lately, how many points we’ve gained and lost from recent occurrences. A person might get up in the morning and think, “How am I doing?” The answer is, in effect: “The weather’s gloomy and that’s dragging me down: negative ten points. I got out of bed too late: negative fifteen points. The stuff I was working on yesterday didn’t get done: negative twenty points. I’ve got a bunch of annoying chores ahead of me: negative thirty points. But I get to have my coffee now: positive forty points.” 

The coffee helps, but we’re still in a point deficit. “How am I doing today? How am I feeling? I’m feeling like negative thirty-five points.”

Meditation can disrupt this view of life, especially if we do it in the morning. When we meditate, we allow thoughts to enter and leave our mind, but instead of pursuing them as we normally would, we aim to treat them with detachment. So we might still have the thought “The weather’s gloomy and that’s dragging me down,” but it no longer means “negative ten points.” If the same thought returns, perhaps it returns as “The weather’s gloomy,” without the conclusion that this is dragging us down. If it returns again, perhaps it comes as “The sky is cloudy.” This neutral framing opens up the possibility of other interpretations. Clouds mean that rain might come, and rain is good for farms, gardens, green things that grow. The neutral framing also opens the possibility of inner silence. “The sky is cloudy,” requires no followup, no further engagement. It is sufficiently inert that it can be acknowledged and allowed to fade from our consciousness altogether.

Such a process of detachment can be carried out with any thought at all, including the thought of the most pressing item on our task list. There might be an important meeting we have to attend in the late afternoon, but while we’re meditating in the early morning we can still find increasing detachment from the idea of that meeting until, perhaps, the idea doesn’t come into mind at all in the remaining time of our meditation session. Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re free from having to prepare for the meeting, arrive there, get through it and follow up – it just means that for a moment, on the very same day when that meeting is to occur, we can achieve a few moments when our mind is clear and free from any thought of that pending task.

If we do this routinely enough, we can find a kind of calm that’s always there, available beneath the crust of our thoughts, available regardless of what happens to be on our to-do list, what’s gotten delayed, what’s not working, what issues have just popped up, and what disasters we’re trying to prevent on any given day. It’s not always easy to achieve this calm, but once you’ve done it just once, you know it’s possible. And fundamentally it’s simple – it’s just about getting good at a mental technique of tuning everything out for a moment – everything but your breath.

And this brings the realization that maybe it’s been a mistake to pin “how we feel” on “how our projects are going.” Maybe it’s been a mistake to connect our mood, even our happiness to the state of our to-do list. Maybe it’s been a mistake to let things that happen to us give us points, and take those points away, as if calm were a reward or “game level” that could be unlocked by acquiring enough credit. 

What happens when we find detachment from the thought that “I’ll feel better after this project is done?”

We can see that this thought is like an advertisement. We’re advertising to ourselves that happiness awaits, if only we do what we’re trying to get ourselves to do.

The question is: why can’t I feel better right now, before the project is done? Why does happiness have to wait? Of course, the fear is that if I allowed myself to feel good now, I wouldn’t have the motivation to complete the project – there’d be nothing to get from it – I’d just slack off, feeling good and doing nothing at all. To be an effective taskmaster, we think we’ve got to constantly make such deals, withholding happiness now so we can promise it to ourself in the future.

But is that true? Maybe if I felt good now I’d do better work because I would approach the project with less anxiety and dependency? I’d approach the project from a standpoint of strength and confidence rather than from the idea that my happiness is the project’s hostage.

Last year I experienced two devastating losses in my immediate family. And one of the things I had to do after my loved ones passed away was to sort through boxes of their paperwork. And that meant boxes of to-do lists. Schedules. Calendars. Doctors reports with followup tests and appointments listed. Printouts of emails about things to be done, dates to be remembered, items to complete.

These tasks were the stuff of life – they were important and meaningful – and they needed to be done.

But going through them drove home the lesson – what’s at the other end of your to-do list?

Death.

That’s what’s at the other end of the long, long to-do list of life, conceived as a project.

But if you accept that life is not a project, it follows that getting through your to-do list is not what’s going to make you happy. Any time you say “I’ll be so much happier when this is done,” think again. Allow yourself happiness now. Then look for another reason to do it, besides the promise of happiness deferred.

Life trains us to think in terms of projects and outcomes because we need to finish projects and achieve specific outcomes to survive, to improve, to prosper, to realize our potential.

But it’s up to us to balance this project-based “training” with a habit, a practice of accepting contentment, allowing for contentment, manifesting contentment wherever possible.

We can try to flip the “game” of life around in such a way that we give ourselves points for allowing contentment.

“How am I doing?” The answer might be, “The weather’s gloomy and that’s dragging me down: That would normally be negative ten points. But I can be content in any case, so I get positive ten for that. I got out of bed too late. That would be negative fifteen points. But I realize I’m still alright, so positive fifteen. The stuff I was working on yesterday didn’t get done: that would be negative twenty points. But I’m practicing contentment and I’m not going to postpone a peaceful state of mind because of all that stuff. So that’s positive twenty.”

We can certainly see life as a project with a beginning and an end, consisting of many smaller projects with their own beginnings and ends.

But we can also see life as a process of connecting and reconnecting to a source of peace and happiness that lies within us and remains within us through shifting circumstances, always available if we know where to look. For some people this might mean connecting with God, or a universal consciousness, and for others it might simply mean connecting with a silence, a quiet space inside the self.

None of this is to say that we don’t need projects, that we don’t need to start and finish them, that we don’t need to take them seriously all the while. It just means that we can find calm, we can accept calm as those projects are going on, even before they’re finished, even regardless of whether those projects succeed, even no matter whether our goals and dreams, our desired outcomes are achieved. Is that so radical?

In the middle of a busy day, or simply in the middle of a busy series of thoughts, if you remember to stop and take a deep, calming breath, are you lucky? If you can focus exclusively on one inhale and one exhale, tuning out the rest of the world for that particular moment, you’ve gained an advantage. There’s a benefit of relaxation and awareness that’s now yours. And if you weren’t consciously planning to take the breath – but rather the idea of it spontaneously emerged in mind – then there’s a sense in which this opportunity was given to you, rather than being something you created. So yes, there’s reason to consider yourself lucky: you are the beneficiary of an unanticipated gift.

But whether this fact is wholesome or not, our perceptions of luck often depend on exclusivity and scarcity. Luck is comparative – we feel lucky in comparison to other people. We feel lucky when we happen upon some valuable object or opportunity that most people don’t have. If you find a twenty-dollar bill on the street you’ll probably feel lucky, based on the assumption that you’re the only person who found anything there. Everyone else saw cigarette butts and bubblegum wads when they looked down at the concrete sidewalk, but the lone twenty saved itself for you! But if you later learn that most of the other pedestrians, walking that same street around the same time as you, had each found a hundred-dollar bill, then you’d start to feel unlucky. What a shame that you found a measly twenty! What did you do to deserve this bad luck?

Consider the device that’s probably in your pocket right now, a “smart phone” that would have appeared to any observer in the 1960s as an unimaginably powerful and miraculous supercomputer. The Beatles didn’t have supercomputers like the one you have. World leaders with nuclear codes didn’t have supercomputers like the one you have. Are you lucky to have that supercomputer now? Maybe, sort of, but the fact that everyone you know also has one makes it less notable, less worthy of an ecstatic feeling.

If that’s how luck tends to be seen – if a good thing is only truly “lucky” if it’s not widely possessed by the people in your orbit – what does that mean for the deep breath you suddenly remembered to take? Does remembering to take it still make you lucky?

There’s a case to be made that yes, it still does.

If you take a deep breath right now, you’ve joined a small group of people taking deep breaths across the world at this same fleeting but irrevocable instant in human history, a group that’s likely smaller than one percent of the world population.

Really, how many people are taking a deep, conscious, calming breath at any particular moment? Look around you, how many do you see? The ones who are doing it, across the world, are either meditating, or doing yoga, or simply engaging in a personal mindfulness practice — but that’s a vanishingly small group. Probably a third of the world population is asleep at any given time, so their breaths are not conscious and intentional. But most of the two-thirds of people who are currently awake are probably just consumed with their lives. They get up, go to work, stay caught up in work, go home, get caught up in what’s going on at home, then go to sleep. Some people have time to play — lucky them — but they’re caught up in play. In either case, they’re unaware of their breathing. Indeed, some of them have never been aware of it, never learned to take a deep breath at all.

Pick a person you know — a typical person, an “average” person. What’s the chance that right now, at this very moment, they’re practicing breath awareness? Not that high, right? So if you’re doing it right now, you’re probably a one-percenter. You’re in the small minority of people experiencing the benefit that comes from a deep, slow, calm, conscious breath. You’re lucky. You’re part of the privileged few. Embrace it. Be a one-percenter. More often!

If compassion is more than a general sense of kindness, more than an omnidirectional attitude of goodwill, then it means witnessing another person’s distress – an individual’s distress – being willing to learn the details, through our own presence and attention, about that person’s unique experience – and wishing for the alleviation of their suffering. But that’s not everything entirely. Compassion also involves a way of thinking about who or what is responsible for the suffering at hand. To be truly compassionate, we must acknowledge that the other person faced a difficult circumstance, one which challenged them and caused them pain – a circumstance which was at least partially outside their control. 

To understand what compassion really is, we might consider its opposite. Perhaps the cruel opposite of compassion would be to see a person in distress and to tell them, “It’s all your fault. You made it happen. You deserve it!”

To be compassionate requires a suspension of blame. When a person comes down with a rare and unexpected illness, of course, there’s no thought of accountability. But in other cases of distress – a failed romance, a lost job – the more we learn about the situation, the more we might notice how the person’s own behavior contributed to their suffering. If we feel strongly that they deserve the unpleasant outcome they got, if we think “they had it coming to them,” then we’re not being compassionate fully. We need to see and acknowledge the aspects of the situation that were out of that person’s control, like how their date behaved, or how their employer behaved, and even how they themselves behaved… due to uncontrollable circumstances like the personality traits that they never elected to have.

We can still have compassion for a thief, all while believing that the thief’s behavior warrants the prison sentence they got, but we might have to work to achieve this compassion. This compassion would come from zooming out and seeing that no one “deserves” the combination of circumstances that would lead them to steal. Even if they “did it,” they didn’t deserve the fate of being born into this world – an innocent infant – and somehow arriving at a life situation that would make them do it. The same is true of a person who suffers distress that seems purely internal, created by and within the self, like when someone is overwhelmed with anxiety, but with no psychiatric diagnosis to blame. An acquaintance might say – “You’re worrying too much – your troubles are all in your mind – you’re bringing this all on yourself,” but that’s not compassionate. To be compassionate requires beginning with the wish that they not suffer, then acknowledging that the mind is a difficult thing to operate, and it comes with no instruction manual – that to have trouble with one’s thoughts is natural and unavoidable, but that no one “deserves” to have this trouble.

If we take compassion, just as we hold it for other people, and if we apply it to our own selves, what happens next? 

Self-compassion might seem like a good and healthy thing to practice, but the attempt to practice it can create confusion and fear, for good reasons.

If self-compassion means having more than a general sense of kindness toward ourselves, more than a vague, nondescript goodwill directed inward, then it means acknowledging our own suffering, and wishing for the alleviation of that suffering. But it’s more than that. To be truly compassionate toward our own self, in the same way we would be compassionate towards another person, we must understand that we faced a difficult circumstance, one which challenged us and caused us pain – a circumstance which was at least partially outside our control.

That’s where it gets tricky. Even knowing all the details we know about the situation and how it came about, including through our own involvement, we must stop blaming ourselves, stop thinking we deserve it, if we’re going to be truly self-compassionate. When we say “It’s all my fault, I own this,” we’re not practicing self-compassion, just as if we said to someone else, you own what happened to you, this wouldn’t be very compassionate either.

But isn’t it supposed to be a good thing to take ownership, to have accountability for our actions, to accept blame where blame’s due? Isn’t it supposed to be a good thing to believe in our own agency, to believe we can change our situation for the better, and to always focus on doing that? Isn’t it supposed to be a good thing to look on the bright side, seeing potential and possibility in any situation, no matter how dark, rather than concentrating on that darkness and how it has dragged us down unavoidably?

Although self-compassion might sound like it should fit well with other attitudes that form a wholesome outlook on life – optimism, perseverance, responsibility – it may be difficult to reconcile with those others. Optimism asks us to see what’s promising in our circumstance, but self-compassion requires that we acknowledge forces outside of our control that hold us back. Perseverance means sticking with our struggle, believing we can get through it, tuning out our pain and cultivating resilience, but self-compassion means acknowledging our limits, accepting that those limits may have been reached. Responsibility means believing that we can control our fate, but self-compassion requires accepting that sometimes we can’t.

“Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” If there’s one quote that’s powerful enough to ease suffering, perhaps that’s the one. But what should a person do before they’ve been granted the “wisdom to know the difference?” How should we behave when we’re not sure – and can find no quick way of discovering – whether our current predicament is one of those things we can change, or one of those things we cannot?

We might feel we should withhold self-compassion until there’s clarity on this. If the situation is really in our control, then we should fight, we should be brave, we should believe ever more strongly in our own agency. Now might not be the time to tune into our suffering. Now might not be the time to reflect on the difficulty of our circumstances, and the random undeservedness of that difficulty.  

Of course, bravery does not require that we completely numb ourselves to our own pain; optimism does not require us to ignore our own hardships or to pretend our circumstances aren’t challenging; responsibility does not require us to deny that some failures were unavoidable; but each of these attitudes involves a choice of where to focus our attention, emphasizing some things and de-emphasizing others.

We might switch back and forth between these perspectives, so that they seem to fuse together, but we may struggle to blend them fully, because they may be incompatible at a microscopic level, in the way oil and water can be whipped together into a convincing emulsion, but never fully mix.

We can try out the lens of optimism, remember what it showed us, and try out the lens of self-compassion, remember what it showed us, and combine the images in our secondary imagination. But it is difficult to look through both lenses at the very same time – on the one hand seeing our agency and power to improve a situation while at the very same time accepting our powerlessness in the face of an adversity that caused us to suffer.

Among the positive attitudes mentioned, self-compassion may be the one that is the most challenging to our ego, because it means accepting that we have less agency over a situation than we would like to have, or than we feel obliged to believe we have. 

Let’s say we lost a tennis game. Losing caused us pain. Self-compassion would ask us to see how there were things outside our control that created this situation, but we may not be ready to admit them – we’d rather think that we had full agency over the game and we just blew it, in an isolated stroke of bad luck. We’d rather think that when we tell ourselves we’re “going to win” we can usually make that happen. We could observe that our opponent had been more skilled than us – but we might not want to admit this. We could observe that our practice routine hadn’t been as effective as we intended – but we might not want to admit this either. And we could accept that the loss really hurt us and we don’t like losing – but we’d rather maintain a self-image that we’re a good sport. Insomuch as self-compassion requires that we acknowledge what we couldn’t control in the situation, it actually requires giving up our ego attachments.

We might also fear where self-compassion leads. On the one hand, there’s the risk that self-compassion could devolve into self-pity, where we become consumed with the challenges we face, thinking of them as unfair and unjust, and feeling hopeless about our chances for improvement. Where is the line between self-compassion and self-pity? Because we can’t always see where that line falls, we might be afraid of moving in that general direction. No one likes a “whimp,” a “whiner,” or a “sore loser” and we don’t want to be one of those.

On the other hand, there’s the risk of self-indulgence, where we become too forgiving of our own bad behavior, in a way that invites more bad behavior. Why didn’t I do the dishes? I wasn’t feeling like it. No big deal. Why didn’t I pay my taxes? The paperwork was too tedious. No big deal. Why didn’t I win the tennis game? I didn’t really feel like practicing. But I forgive myself?

As children we are taught that certain things are unacceptable, like stealing. And it’s important that we maintain these learned boundaries as adults, now reinforced by reasons we fully comprehend. But what does it mean when we classify a behavior as “unacceptable”? It is a promise to ourselves that if we ever did that thing, we wouldn’t forgive ourselves. And the knowledge that we wouldn’t forgive ourselves then becomes a stopgap, keeping us from doing it if we’re ever tempted. And since we know this promise of non-forgiveness is a powerful stopgap, we might try to use it for other things that are less bad than stealing, but more tempting in our own lives — things we just really want to avoid. We might say that “giving up” is unacceptable — giving up on, say, an essay writing project, or a baking contest, or a business venture – “If I ever gave up, I’d never forgive myself.” Which is to say we’d never allow ourselves to have self-compassion regarding this broken promise and the pain that ensued. That pain would be ours, entirely “on us.”

The fear of self-compassion is that once we start forgiving this, forgiving that – if we can truly forgive ourselves for anything, or at least if we can take a loving stance toward ourselves in any situation, regardless of what happened, then we’d be giving up the boundaries – the electric fences – that keep us in order, keep us moving in the right direction down the straight and narrow path.

I was meditating this morning, but I wasn’t as committed to it as I could have been. You could say I didn’t take ownership over my meditation session. I reached far across the table in front of me to grab my phone a few times. There were no urgent events demanding my attention, but I lazily allowed myself to get caught up in unforced distractions, picking up my phone just because I was feeling “fidgety.” Afterwards, I felt bad about what had happened. You could say I “suffered” in an itty-bitty, forgettable sort of way, but still in a way.

Looking back on this, I could practice self-compassion. I could notice that concentration is hard for humans. In trying to meditate, I was trying to do something difficult. Efforts like this don’t always succeed and I was experiencing that difficulty. And hey, it wasn’t me who invented mobile phones and made them addictive.

But there’s a sense that I shouldn’t let myself off the hook. I should have “tried harder” because I am capable of better. Since I know my phone can be distracting, why didn’t I put it in another room? Why did I keep scrolling when I could have stopped? If I had just been more committed – not thinking I could “get away” with a sloppy approach and forget about it later – I might have had a better outcome.

So what should I do now? Should I have self-compassion, focusing on what a profound challenge concentration actually is, and seeing how my wavering in the face of that challenge was natural? Or should I have accountability, realizing I could have done better and should do better next time, no excuses? 

Fortunately, there’s a way I can take the perceived risks of self-compassion off the table.

I can see that although I “failed,” I still believe in the possibility of doing better – self-compassion isn’t going to take that optimism away.

I can see that although I “failed,” I’m still trying – I’m still in the game, still going to practice tomorrow morning, and the next – and self-compassion isn’t going to take that persistence away.

So if I’m afraid of self-compassion because I think it will make me lazy and self-pitying, I can completely take those risks off the table. But I have to work to take those risks off the table. I have to actually still be hoping, I have to actually still be trying. In doing those things with self-compassion, I can now do them with greater ease.

With its focus on things beyond our control, things which caused us to suffer unavoidably, self-compassion might seem contrary to optimism, which would have us look on the bright side, appreciating our agency and potential for improvement. But self-compassion can indeed engender optimism. Because once we acknowledge that our situation is challenging – yes, genuinely challenging for anyone – then we can stop feeling like “It’s all me – I’m just bad at this.” If it’s a truly hard situation then there’s hope for us. Then our failures don’t indicate that it’s only we who are inadequate. Our failures simply indicate that we’ve been facing a true test. So we can see our failures as events to be expected rather than as evidence that we’re not capable or competent and we never will be.

What’s the point of all this? It’s to show that being overly hard on ourselves is not just a character weakness and not just a bad habit that we can overcome by deciding not to do it. It’s the result of a philosophically deep tension between self-compassion and other virtues we might hold dear. There is a way to resolve that tension in part. But if you struggle with self-compassion, the first thing to realize is – self-compassion is hard – and if it’s hard for you, that’s because it’s hard in general – and that’s not your fault!

If someone turns to you and says “Imagine a chihuahua!” and you begin seeing – almost involuntarily seeing – those tiny paws, that wagging tail, the little smiling eyes looking fondly up at you – a whimper here, an excited shiver there – why do you ever stop imagining this? What saves you from the tragedy of death-by-thinking-of-a-chihuahua-for-too-long? 

If you were to imagine a chihuahua – right now, even – I bet you wouldn’t start with a plan. You wouldn’t decide precisely how long you’d give to this endeavor. No, you’d plunge into it without fear of death. It’s certain that you’d survive this chihuahua-fest, exiting at a reasonable time, well before dehydration ensued. Imagining a chihuahua is usually not fatal. But why not?

Our attention spans are growing ever-shorter as we writhe in an ever-thickening jungle of notifications and texts and emails and alerts – that’s a common complaint of our digital age. We seek quiet, away from our devices, to rekindle lost powers of concentration. But even if we succeed at unplugging all the things in our lives that beep, and even if we consider what the world was like before there were any things that beeped, we see an axiom of attention everywhere in effect: attention doesn’t last, and it never did. It’s fickle and fleeting, reliably so. We needn’t bother to contemplate the danger of focusing on a chihuahua and never changing focus, for that danger will never come to pass. And it never would have come to pass in any earlier era.

And so, as we lament our distractibility, it’s easy to forget the virtue thereof. It’s easy to ignore our reliance on distractibility – on a certain baseline level of inattention – to facilitate the multi-tasking that’s necessary for life. Being totally scatterbrained is a handicap indeed, but being a little bit scatterbrained? It helps us. Flightiness, in the right amount, ensures that we’ll periodically revisit the things that need our attention, rather than getting eternally stuck on one thing.

As we go about our lives, when we focus on one thing or another, we can expect that focus to be disrupted in time, from outside or from within, and that’s good. From outside, we may hear the rumble of an airplane overhead, a car alarm, a person’s laugh – good! From inside, we might get bored with one thought – good! Hungry – good! Tired – good! Or one thought might lead to another – a chihuahua to an Irish Wolfhound and then to our childhood Dachshund “Pepper,” and from there to a friend who shares that nickname – good!

But even when our focus isn’t lost to fatigue or redirected through free-association, eventually our mind will interrupt itself, asking “What am I doing right now? How long have I been doing this? What was I doing before this?” When these questions enter our consciousness, they give us a chance to refocus – to jump out of a “rabbit hole” of one thought and continue with other lines of thought that had been suspended. There are so many forces ready to “steal” our attention that we can rest assured it will be stolen eventually – and that’s good! It’s good because it lets us move on to the next thing. 

If the tragedy of death-by-thinking-of-a-chihuahua-for-too-long is so very improbable, what is the point of even considering it? 

The point is to uncover a source of gratitude in our lives that might be going unnoticed. We’ve just seen that the volatility of attention is – in some ways – lifesaving. It’s lifesaving because it prevents us from getting stuck. It frees us from monomania. But we can go further. We can notice how this volatility of attention sometimes results in a “beneficial landing,” so to speak, and we can take more time to appreciate these beneficial landings.

If we could scan the history of our personal attention, seeing a timeline of what we were focusing on at any moment in our life so far, we would indeed see many unfortunate attentional shifts. We’d find many unlucky occasions when we wanted or intended to sustain focus on one particular thing, but our focus got diverted to something else. Trying to work, started checking news. Trying to read, car alarm went off. These are the times when distractibility was a nuisance.

But we would also see a lot of fortunate events, when out of the blue, we remembered something we hoped we’d remember – a friend’s birthday just popped into mind. Or when our focus was suddenly diverted to an important task we had been ignoring. Or when our mind suddenly jumped out of a destructive spiral of thoughts – ruminating about some past failure, or catastrophizing about some future malady (death by chihuahua?) – and we were freed to move on, to focus on another thing, something better or more important. 

If we were freed, did we free ourselves? Or was this liberation a lucky thing that happened to us?

Assuming we had been completely lost in thought, then the sudden awareness of being lost – that’s a thing that happened to us. We had been considering the chihuahua and only the chihuahua. It was our brain – an object – that automatically, involuntarily raised the question “What am I doing?” We didn’t will that question to arise. And so it’s reasonable to classify that question’s emergence in our conscious awareness as an event that happened to us, rather than as an event that was made to happen by us. 

If you’re convinced that gratitude is health-giving, and you’re looking for more things to be grateful for, consider such events. Any time your attention is returned to you – any time your mind jumps out of a rabbit hole and lets you choose how to refocus – that’s a good thing that happened to you and it’s something you can be grateful for. Any time your attention lands on a topic that you wanted to invest in, that’s a good thing that happened to you and you’re “lucky” at that particular moment.

You might wonder why a person would want to look for gratitude here, at the microscopic level of attentional transitions, when there are so many things in the larger scale of our lives to be grateful for. One reason to look here is that attention shifts are simple, they’re real, and as they happen, they’re fresh, they’re recent, they’re new.

I am grateful for my life partner, and I feel fortunate when I think about our relationship. But there’s complexity in considering who I’ve become as a person in the twenty years since we met, who he has become as a person in all that time, and how our relationship has grown in all that time. I feel incredibly lucky for all that time, but it’s a luck that’s been evolving; it’s not a new, sudden, simple kind of luck. To contemplate it requires more than a moment.

On the other hand, if I’ve gotten lost scrolling through news reports – a bombing here, an oil spill there, one calamity after another with no end in sight – but if I suddenly remember to take a deep breath, then that breath is like a simple gift I’ve been given out of nowhere. A sudden blessing. The random shift in attention from bad news to calming breath – that’s a lucky occurrence, a good thing that happened to me just now, right this moment, newer than the news.

If we tune into the good luck that can be found in our involuntary attentional transitions, then we can sit down and do nothing – that’s to say, we can meditate – and feel really lucky all the while. When we try to focus on our breathing, and inevitably find ourselves getting lost in thought, that distraction might seem to be unfortunate. But when we realize that we’ve been thinking, this realization gives us a chance to return to breathing, and we can feel lucky for this chance. We can spend an hour and experience hundreds of such lucky events. Breathing, then thinking, then having the good luck to notice the thinking and now be able to return to breathing. Just sitting down with no goal at all, we can spend minutes or hours feeling we’ve been the beneficiary of good luck throughout. 

I put this idea into practice yesterday on an urban walk. I wanted to see if I could take a long walk through my neighborhood and stay connected to my breathing – inhale, exhale – while also absorbing the sights and sounds of the city, but not thinking about anything in particular. A thoughtless, observational walk, where I wasn’t ruminating or reminiscing or trying to plan my evening or mentally composing an essay as I was walking. Did this happen? Not a chance. There are too many things in the city that remind me of other things – I see a restaurant and remember my last meal there with a friend from out of town. I see a rosebush and remember the time I tried to photograph it. I’ve tried taking a meditative urban walk many times over the years and it’s never been as “meditative” as I had hoped.

But this time, whenever my attention landed on breathing – back where I had wanted it to stay – I made a point of saying, “Oh, I’m lucky. I’m noticing my breathing again – a good thing just happened!”

I could have said to myself “Breathing – that’s what I was supposed to be concentrating on all along.” I could have considered myself unlucky that I had been distracted for so long and that my concentration had been so poor. But by focusing instead on my good luck – the good luck of spontaneously, randomly remembering to breathe, even though so many other things clamored for my attention – I came to develop a sense of awe. This was just a simple walk through the city, and yet I was experiencing one lucky event after another. Was I maintaining my focus on breathing throughout the walk? Certainly not. But was I still experiencing good fortune, finding that my attention randomly, luckily landed on breathing, time after time? Yes!

If we take more time to appreciate the “beneficial landings” of our volatile, randomly moving attention, we can come to feel quite lucky, but why do this? What’s the value in cultivating the sense that we’re lucky? Well, it makes you feel good and it helps you think clearly. When you feel fearful and upset many times in a row, these occasions all blur together and you just come away feeling bad, frustrated, even confused. But if you think you’ve been lucky many times in a row, then all these moments seem to connect to each other – you remember them better – you can see their relatedness more clearly – and you come away feeling somewhat amazed that fortune has been on your side throughout. Taking a walk around a city, or just going about your day, you can have either experience, one of continuing mishap, or one of continuing good luck – depending on how you choose to interpret the many landings and repositionings that your attention constantly undergoes. Taking time to appreciate the beneficial landings is a reliable way to feel good.

It’s easy to concentrate on a task we enjoy, but how can we sustain focus on a task we despise? 

We might wish for a better life, in which we’ve been so successful at manifesting our dreams that the only tasks confronting us now are joyful and exhilarating ones. But even those people who once yearned to be astronauts and ballet dancers and did become those very things… even they have to do things that aren’t fun, interesting, rewarding, or exciting. Practicing a jump for the thousandth time? There is tedium in the loftiest endeavors. 

Setting deadlines, establishing incentives, making public commitments, and cultivating grit – these are common strategies for getting through an onerous task. But such strategies assume that if we don’t like a task, then working on it will inevitably feel bad, so we need to force, persuade, or trick ourself into bearing that discomfort. 

The saying goes, “No pain, no gain,” but wouldn’t it be better if we could have “No pain, with gain?” To achieve this would require that our experience of working on an onerous task could be separated from our feelings about the task. Is there a way to make that separation happen, so that the experience could be positive even though the task itself might be anathema to us?

To find out, we need to look closely at the nature of concentration, and here, an analogy to physical balance is informative. When we see a person standing on one leg, or balancing on a tightrope, we know that their muscles are working – their stillness is an active sort. It may look as though the person has escaped the force of gravity but of course they are still subject to that force, constantly experiencing a pull this way and that. What keeps them in balance is the way they quickly respond to the beginnings of imbalance, applying the right countering force at the right time.

We could say that a person with good balance is always being slightly destabilized and always recovering. But because their destabilization remains inside a safe range where recovery can be quick, we don’t even bother to call it “destabilization.”  We just say that the person is keeping good balance throughout. But this language hides an observation that’s useful: balance is not about magic, it’s about recovery. Lots and lots of recoveries so fast and effortless we don’t even notice them.

Concentration is like this too. A person who exhibits good concentration is not a person who has magically escaped all distractions. We make a mistake if we think that good concentration must mean being in “the zone” where we lose awareness of everything but the task at hand. A person with good concentration might still hear a car alarm or see an incoming text message. They might still lose focus for a moment, wondering “What am I going to have for dinner tonight?” What defines good concentration is being able to quickly recover from each distraction. A person with poor concentration hears the car alarm, gets up to investigate, and exulting in their newfound freedom, they never return to the task at hand; a person with good concentration hears it, stops for a second, and gets back to work. Good concentration is good recovery, on repeat.

So if we want to be better at concentrating, especially at things we dislike, we need to understand what allows for good recovery from distraction, and what interferes with such recovery.

Let’s start with what’s obvious: loving what we’re doing allows for good recovery. If a task brings us pleasure, we’re drawn back to it because we want more of that pleasure. After we get distracted, and our attention later returns to the pleasurable task, we feel glad to be focusing on it again, excited to take the next step. We experience recovery as a boon.

Hating what we’re doing, of course, makes for poor recovery. If a task causes discomfort, we’re repelled from it because we don’t want to face more of that discomfort. After we get distracted, and our attention lands on the task once more, we might feel fear, or disgust, or guilt – a lump in our stomach – “Oh no, not this again!” We experience recovery as a loss.

Imagine how hard it would be to maintain physical balance – standing on one leg or walking a tightrope – if every time a muscle flexed to keep us stable, we felt a jolt of pain. And yet when we’re trying to concentrate on something we hate – that’s the situation we’re in. Every time we try to recover from a distraction, turning our focus back to the onerous task, we feel pain.

So if we want to concentrate on something we hate, we need to make recovery less painful and more pleasurable. But if we truly hate the task, how could returning to it ever be experienced as a positive thing?

I began thinking about this question earlier in my life, during a phase in my twenties when I had started a flurry of personal projects and couldn’t seem to bring any of them to closure. I was effective at my day job, never missing a deadline in my software engineering work, but it took a lot of willpower to maintain my punctual record there, and I couldn’t muster that same willpower in the absence of external pressure, working on my own creative endeavors. I went to see a psychologist, and she administered what seemed like a glorified questionnaire, and I answered enough questions the right way that I received a diagnosis of ADHD. For a moment, I thought this diagnosis was going to shed new light on my life and become a part of my identity. 

As I explained it to my therapist at a time, my mind was constantly going on tangents when I tried to focus. I couldn’t abandon these tangents because doing so was just too painful. I’d sit down to work on one project, like writing an essay on a Topic A, and as interesting as this project had been at the outset, my mind would soon invent something more exciting to pursue, another essay on Topic B, and I’d start thinking about this new thing, researching it, planning it out. When I tried to return to the original essay on Topic A, I’d experience a letdown, a loss of stimulation, and my mind would respond by inventing yet another essay on Topic C. To “give up” on a promising tangent felt like hell. So I was always trying to write a dozen essays and never finishing any of them. If only I had better willpower, and could bear the pain.

I took Adderall for a year and I learned something from it. Along with the energy and euphoria it created, Adderall seemed to function like a painkiller for me. With Adderall, I could concentrate better because I felt less pain when I returned to a task that wasn’t as exciting as a distraction I had begun to pursue. Adderall softened the blow of recovery, making it easier to “give up” on the tangent and continue the slog on the original task.

But when I saw that Adderall was giving me superhuman powers of concentration, I felt inclined to use those powers to work on the projects I most wanted to do rather than on the things I most needed to do. Since Adderall couldn’t help me choose between want and need, it didn’t help me become more organized in my life overall. That’s to say it didn’t help me choose the “right” or the “best” things to work on. And when I realized I had become dependent on it, and when one time there was a glitch in getting my prescription filled, I decided to give it up altogether. Many years later, I don’t believe I have ADHD, but I have struggled with concentration at various times in my life and those struggles have made me think a lot about how concentration works. If my diagnosis didn’t prove right in the end, it still left me with some insight into the nature of concentration that helped me later when I began to meditate. 

Meditation is basically the practice of concentration as an end in itself, independent from any specific goal. In meditation, every teacher will say, distraction is normal. We try to focus on our breathing but thoughts clamor for our attention. Instead of feeling frustrated that our mind has wandered, we are encouraged to take a non-judgmental attitude, observing our thoughts without engaging them – instead, letting them dissipate, like passing weather.

If we were to feel frustrated and upset every time our mind wandered during meditation, then this frustration would compound the distraction, making it even harder to return to our chosen point of focus. In a sense, the ideas of non-judgement, tolerance, and acceptance pave the way for better recovery.

But non-judgement is trickier than it sounds. A posture of non-judgement might conceal a judgment we’ve already made and don’t want to admit. In my early attempts at meditation, I would try to be non-judgemental about the distractions I experienced but I still wasn’t happy about them. The phrase “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” has comedic value because it pretends to be non-judgemental while at the same time implying: maybe there is something wrong with it, at least maybe there are people who think so. I would sit down to meditate, and my thoughts would race, and I’d keep telling myself, in effect, “It’s OK. It’s no big deal. It’s not the end of the world. I just lost ten minutes to mind-wandering – what a shame – not that there’s anything wrong with that!” Eventually, all of this concealed negativity would build up and I’d still feel quite frustrated by the end of a process that was supposed to lead to relaxation.

A key idea that helped me in my own meditation practice was to set equanimity aside and instead focus on the positive side of distraction. What positive side? The positive side was that I noticed I had gotten distracted. If I hadn’t noticed it, I’d still be stuck inside the distracting thought. But because my mind jumped out of that rabbit hole and asked the question “What am I doing right now?” I received an opportunity to observe my thoughts from a distance and bring my focus back to breathing. Now, thanks to this gift of this awareness, my meditation practice could continue. 

The idea here is to make recovery smoother by appreciating it. Instead of trying to soften our negative feelings about a distraction, we can turn our focus away from those negative feelings altogether, concentrating on positive feelings instead: gratitude for the recovery itself. Every time the mind wanders, this sets the stage for later noticing that it has wandered, feeling good that we’ve noticed it, and being thankful for the benefit therein. The benefit is the opportunity to go on with practice. In this way, meditation can be transformed from a series of frustrations into a series of fortunate events. What had been “Distraction. Bad that it happened! Distraction. Bad that it happened!” can become “Distraction. Good that I recovered! Distraction. Good that I recovered!”

But this is more than just a technique for meditation, it’s a framework for concentrating on any task. Whether we like a task or not, we can always see it as a way of practicing concentration. The details of a task, whatever they are, can become a substrate for this practice. We can approach the task as a kind of “meditation,” where we return our focus to the task every time we notice we’ve become distracted from it. We can improve these recoveries by appreciating them, by seeing them as beneficial events.

When we realize we’ve gotten distracted and we remember what we were trying to do, we can stop seeing this attention shift as unfortunate – “Oh no, a bad thing happened – I’m unlucky – now I have to work on this unpleasant thing again.” Instead we can see it as fortunate – “Oh yes, a good thing happened – I’m lucky – now I get to continue my concentration practice.” 

If we see our goal as the development of concentration itself, then we can feel grateful for each recovery. And we should feel grateful, because it’s these repeated recoveries that allow us to have agency in our lives, that allow us to proceed with the things we’ve decided to do. Our ability to recover from distraction is in some ways the basis of our “free will,” and there’s reason to feel thankful each time we get to exercise that will.

Still, when we really hate what we’re trying to do, the idea of treating the task as “concentration practice,” might not be motivating enough to overcome our internal resistance. Indeed, there’s more we can do to help ourselves focus, more we can do to smoothen our recoveries.

First, we need to identify the good in what we’re trying to do. We might detest the task – maybe we’re doing taxes, for example – but how does this thing benefit us? How does it benefit someone else? How does it benefit society? There must be a value in it somewhere, or else we wouldn’t be doing it at all. 

If we’re doing taxes, then at a minimum we’re preserving our financial and legal health. If we’re writing a difficult letter, it’s for communication, relationships, social health. If we’re sorting through a cluttered room, it’s for home upkeep, domestic health, peace of mind. If we’re doing a hopeless, vacuous project that we’ve been assigned to complete, maybe the benefit is only that we get to maintain our relationship with the person who asked us to do it; so again, the benefit could be relationships, social health? If we started doing it, there’s got to be a reason. Let’s find the pure, positive core of that reason.

Now, as part of the recovery from each distraction, we can visualize that positive core, and we can feel good that we have an opportunity to make a little more progress in its service.

Of course, it will be hard to keep a clear view of the benefit we’re working toward, because our mind will invent stories and arguments that devalue the goal itself and all our efforts to achieve it. These devaluing arguments will seem fascinating and persuasive in proportion to the annoyingness of the task. Our mind generates these arguments because we believe that if we can find proof that a task has no merit and no chance of success, we can get out of having to do it. These arguments intoxicate us, therefore, because they seem to offer an escape from pain.

If we’re doing taxes, some arguments might be: I’m not good at this. I can do it later, I can file an extension. I’m not going to get it right. I’m not in the mood right now so I won’t be as effective as I’d be later when I’m in a better mood. Taxes are unfair. I’m losing money that I deserve to keep. It’s taking too long – something’s wrong. I made the wrong choice to work on this now. The weather is beautiful today so it’s more valuable for me to go outside and enjoy it now than to keep working indoors.

Any time our mind generates these devaluing arguments, there’s a chance that they contain some truth. The weather might be great! But that doesn’t matter from the standpoint of concentration practice. We shouldn’t look deeper for the truth in these arguments nor should we try to refute them – both pathways are distractions. As soon as we get into a debate with ourselves about the value of what we’re doing – including whether now is the “right” time to do it – we’ve set ourselves up for the very pain that we’re hoping to escape.

Think about it, if you try to do something hard, and then someone tells you that this effort you’ve just made is a worthless waste, that hurts! And it hurts even more if it’s your own mind telling you that, because when you dispute the statement, you’re disputing yourself. When we find a task really unpleasant, it’s often right HERE, in the self-sabotaging vortex of fear-driven ideation that the pain actually resides.

What we learn to do in meditation – observing our thoughts and letting them pass – is precisely how we should handle all the colorful arguments our mind invents to devalue our goal. Any time a devaluing thought arises, we should say “That’s a devaluing idea, invented as an escape from pain,” and let it go on its way. If we do this, the pain itself may subside, because we will no longer be in conflict with ourself. If we go further and appreciate the good fortune of our recovery from distraction, the pain can give way to pleasure.

To spell this out, imagine your mind tells you: “This isn’t going well, you should stop working on it and here’s why.” 

Don’t get into an argument. Don’t say, “No, it’s really important that I keep doing this and here are all the reasons.” 

Just think of the idea “You should stop and here’s why” as a story, a fiction, a construct.

You can say, “Hello, Mr. Story. Thanks, but I don’t need your services to help me escape this pain right now.” 

This essay was almost lost to the devaluing story, “No one is going to read it.” That thought was “exciting” to me at one point because it seemed to offer a justification for stopping work and thereby gaining a free afternoon. But the reason these words are here is because I practiced what this essay itself is preaching.

In using meditation as a framework for concentrating on any difficult task, there’s one more lesson we can draw. Just like meditation often uses breathing as a primary focal point, we can use breathing – perhaps as a secondary focal point – when we’re trying to concentrate on a difficult task. Each time we recover from a distraction, a good way to manifest gratitude for our recovery is to tune in with our breathing: take a deep breath, maybe a few. The more we let ourselves breathe as we work, the better the work will feel. Often when we fear a task, it’s because the task leads to shallow, restricted breathing which makes us feel uncomfortable without knowing why.

In conclusion, concentration is like physical balance in that it depends on recovery. When we don’t like what we’re doing, it’s hard to recover from distractions, but the recovery gets easier if we take it as our goal to practice concentration itself. In that case, recovery allows our practice to continue, and we can feel grateful for that opportunity. To further support this gratitude for recovery, we can focus on the benefit of the task. To do this, we need to tune out all the stories our mind is inventing to devalue that benefit. These stories may fascinate us as they offer a way to escape the pain of working on the task, but we should not seek truth in them nor try to rebut them; instead we should let them dissipate as we would handle any thoughts that come up during meditation. If we do all this successfully, we can reach a point where it’s actually pleasurable to work on something that was painful and annoying. 

This is not going to happen with one simple shift in mindset. The pain of the difficult task will not be converted into pleasure in an instant, and we should not expect this. Rather, the pleasure gradually develops as we keep recovering and taking a moment to appreciate the good fortune of each recovery. As our focus stays more and more on this “good fortune” we begin to forget the “bad fortune” of having to work on the thing we don’t want to do. Little by little, it starts to feel better to work on it. If we tune out the devaluing stories, and bypass the inner conflict they would create, we can begin to appreciate the inherent benefit of doing the task. And before long, it’s done.

If a person wants to experiment with a more positive perspective on life, they face a practical challenge. A positive perspective would mean fewer negative thoughts, but negative thoughts can be difficult to spot – they may be invisible unless you know where to look for them. If we’re hoping to alter these negative thoughts, we must find them where they’re occurring, but how? 

One important place to look for negativity is in what we might call the “automatic status check.” That is when the mind involuntarily asks “What am I doing right now?” An answer quickly follows: “I’m writing,” or “I’m walking,” or “I’m eating.” Throughout the day, we take stock of our situation, reminding ourselves of what we’re doing now, what we were doing earlier, and what we’ll be doing next. If we look closely at our responses to these involuntary status inquiries – if we examine the content of our “automatic status reports,” so to speak, we may find a negative trailer in tow. 

Instead of “I’m writing” we might report to ourself that “I’m writing BUT it’s taking forever and I’m not done.” Instead of “I’m walking” we might report that “I’m walking BUT it’s raining and I’m wet and uncomfortable.” Instead of “I’m eating” we might report that “I’m eating BUT the rice is burnt and I hate it.” The status reports we give to ourself throughout the day can be a major vector of negativity.

We can go a long way towards a positive mindset by shifting the content of our status reports to exclude the negative trailer. If we were to say “I’m writing” without the “BUT” that follows, we could see that we’re doing something good, something we want to do. Rather than failing at a task, we’re taking advantage of our good fortune to have the opportunity to do that task.

Meditation is a way to learn to notice these status checks as they happen, because meditation depends on them. When we sit down to meditate, we might intend to give our attention to breathing, but inevitably we get distracted by a sequence of thoughts. “I’m hungry… what am I going to have for lunch?… maybe I’ll go to that Thai place down the block… you know I’ve wanted to visit Bangkok for years now, maybe it’s time for a vacation?” At some point this chain of thought is interrupted by a status check: “What am I doing right now?” This status check is good fortune, because it allows us to notice that we’ve gotten distracted – “Oh! I’ve been thinking about going on vacation!” – which in turn allows us to remember that our intention was to concentrate on breathing. Now we have an opportunity to return to that.

In meditation, we can practice giving ourself a positive status report. When we notice we’ve gotten distracted, instead of saying “Oh! I’ve thinking about a vacation but I was trying to meditate and I’ve wasted so much time and this whole meditation thing is not going well,” we can say “Oh! I was thinking about vacation but now that I realize this, I can go back to breathing, which is good.”

The same practice can be done outside meditation, in the course of everyday life. The other morning, I was working on an essay — this very one. Whenever my mind asked “What am I doing right now?” the answer was “I’m writing BUT I’m not done – it’s taking forever and I’m behind where I want to be.” Moments later, the same question: “What am I doing right now?” My mind’s immediate response again included a fact followed by a devaluing interpretation. “I’m writing BUT it’s taking forever and I’m behind where I want to be.” Whenever I took stock of what I had been doing, my mind immediately injected a negative interpretation that condemned everything I had been doing. 

Later in the day, I went for a hike. Whenever my mind asked “What am I doing right now?” the answer was “I’m hiking BUT it’s not strenuous enough to give me the exercise I need.” And whenever my mind asked “What was I doing before this?” the answer was “I was writing BUT I got stuck and didn’t finish.”

To think of it though, this day was an amazing day. A full day when I could write and hike. What could be better? If this day could stress me out, this day when I had the freedom to do the things that are most meaningful and important to me in life, what hope of happiness could I ever have?

It might seem that if only I’d finished the essay and if only the hike had been sufficiently strenuous, then I’d have been satisfied. But of course, the responses to the status checks might then have been “I’m writing BUT the essay hasn’t turned out as well as I hoped,” and “I’m hiking BUT it’s a struggle and I’m out of shape.” There’s always a way to be unsatisfied.

I could see that the “cure” was not to change the reality of the situation – the cure was to change the responses I was giving myself during the status checks. In any situation, no matter how wonderful, yes, there’s a way to give a negative report, but the converse is also true, in any situation no matter how bad, there’s a way to give a positive report. So satisfaction really depends on what gets included and excluded from that report.

And here’s where things get fun. Since I’m a visual thinker, this report doesn’t need to be a verbal report, it can be a picture. And as a picture it doesn’t need to be a detailed image. It can be a generalized icon.

So I tried it. As I was writing, when I noticed the question enter my mind – “What am I doing right now?” I thought of an image like this:

Later, as I was hiking, when I noticed the question enter my mind “What am I doing right now,” I thought of an image like this:

What was I doing before?

What am I going to do next?

Wow, this is an amazing day!

Within the inviolable confines of a person’s inner life, should a person feel free to remember the past in whatever way they choose? Do we as individuals possess complete freedom in how we employ the capacity of memory, or are we under an obligation to do our remembering in a specific way – with fairness, accuracy, thoroughness – even when we are remembering private events and even when we are doing that remembering in private? If our memories are truly “our own,” available for us to unpack and interpret however we like, why does the past so often become a burden, a source of sadness? Why do we not use our “freedom of memory” to create a vision of the past that inspires rather than depresses us?

It’s common to think that a person’s inner life is a walled fortress – exclusive, and beyond the jurisdiction of anything external. We can influence each other to think or feel a certain way – through conversation, argument, advertisement, seduction, aggression, or kindness – but we still cannot access or control each other’s experiences directly, and that has been a basic fact of the human situation from prehistory to date. But we do have expectations of each other, not only expectations about how we should behave in public, but yes, expectations about how we might conduct our inner lives, including the way we might remember the past.

To see this, consider a scenario involving a husband and wife. After five years of marriage, the wife passes away from a sudden illness. Does the husband have the “right” to reminisce about his wife in a selective way – picturing her in her earlier health, in happier times, without also focusing on the tragedy of her death? Of course he does, and this positive approach – appreciating the good of the past, and not lingering too much on the pain – is an option that his friends and family might hope he could take – if not now, then someday – on the path to healing.

Now consider a different husband and wife, where after five years of marriage, the wife passes away but in this case it is because the husband is a violent man and he killed her. From his jail cell, does this murderer have the “right” to reminisce about his wife in a selective way, taking pleasure in the memory of their earlier relationship – without also thinking of his heinous crime? The legal system might dictate that the man should spend the rest of his life in prison, but there are no laws that govern how he should use his memory. Confined by prison walls, he is still “free” to remember whatever he wants. That said, an image of this man in his cell, pleasantly recalling his honeymoon, untroubled by what happened later, is not an image of “justice.” We would want the murderer to remember his wife, but only in the context of acknowledging and feeling remorse for his crime. 

Now consider a third scenario, again a husband and wife, where after several years of happy marriage, in the fifth year they grew apart, quarreled endlessly, and divorced. Does the husband have the right to reminisce about the relationship selectively, without recalling the quarrels? If the two were to meet and jointly reminisce about their positive moments, and those alone, this could be a path to reviving the marriage. But if the husband only remembered the quarrels his wife had provoked without remembering the ones he himself had provoked, this would be gaslighting of the worst form. Selective memory seems acceptable here if it’s done fairly, if the selections are unbiased, but not otherwise.

The point of these examples is that while we might think that a person has absolute freedom over their inner life, including freedom of memory, we’re full of expectations about memory and how it should be used.  When we consider people in specific circumstances, we often have an idea of how those people should undertake the process of recollection. This intuitive sense of there being a right and a wrong way to remember affects our own process of remembering too. And that’s only natural. Memory may seem to be a private matter but to the extent we communicate about our memories and express the feelings they inspire, those memories have an impact beyond the self. 

Perhaps a reason why we are concerned with the accuracy of memory – why we are afraid of delusion, so to speak – is because we want to stay connected to other people. Shared memories bring us closer but when we remember things in completely different and contradictory ways, it drives us apart. If we felt free to alter our memories in whatever way we pleased, it would lead eventually to isolation. We could create a utopia of omissions and confabulations, yes, but then we wouldn’t understand each other and we wouldn’t understand ourselves – how we got to where we are.

I have a friend whose ability to focus on fun and positive things, while downplaying the “memory” of his obligations, might be leading him to debt and financial disaster. So there are good reasons why we should want to practice a kind of memory hygiene and why we might feel compelled to remember things in a way that seems honest and accurate, fair and comprehensive. But the burden we feel about memory, the constraints we place upon ourselves as remembering beings, can lead to a topsy-turvy situation. In our efforts to remember things “properly” we may become cut off from the aspects of the past that might help us the most.

We’re all seeking positive experiences in life, right? We all want good things to happen to us. And you’d think that the more positive experiences a person has had, the better off they’d be. Now, it’s to be expected that sad memories would make us sad: if something unfortunate occurs, and then passes, the pain of it can still be revived – that’s what memory is. But if a person is fortunate enough to repeatedly attain those good experiences that they hoped for, the net effect of all that goodness should be to put them in a happier state – doesn’t it seem like that? 

Yet we find that good things cause pain to recall as well. How is that? Why do happy memories make us cry? Why is it that these good experiences we’re seeking can turn into memories that drag us down, depress us, make us unhappy?

Of course it’s because the memory of a good thing creates a sense of loss if we don’t have that good thing anymore and if we see no prospect of regaining it. My mother told me the other day that when she thought of our old house with my stepdad and my brother living there, she felt such unbearable sadness that she didn’t know how to cope. And I understood. It’s because my stepdad and my brother passed away last year, 2022, and they’re not coming back. To think of that happier time in the old house when our family was intact makes the present time feel all the more empty for my mother, and for me. 

But I am trying to help my mother through this, so it’s my role to see things in a way that could be comforting. When she said this, and when I thought of those good times in the old house, one fact stood out to me: they were good. Those moments of family closeness were the kind of experience that everyone seeks. How can it be that having had those good experiences – decades of them – now creates anguish, consigns us to sadness and pain? Shouldn’t it be that the good things in our past actually help us and give us hope for the future? And wouldn’t our family members who have passed away want this much for us, that we could find consolation in our memories of them, and that the happy times of the past could benefit us now, rather than seeming to drag us down in our time of need?

I know that healing takes time – an indefinite amount – and I know that these few questions are no magical cure for grief. I tried to bring it up gently with my mother, that maybe there’s a way to open ourselves more to the good of the past without seeing so much of the darkness, but it will be hard and cannot be rushed. So I’d like to consider a situation that is much further in the past, where my own grief has had time to play out.

One of the happiest moments in my life was developing a fascination with theoretical computer science in college and eventually getting accepted into a PhD program in that subject, at MIT in 1998. That was twenty-five years ago. I had found my path. I had figured out who I wanted to be and what work I wanted to do. I would be joining a community of scholars and looking forward to a life of intellectual stimulation and discovery.

That was a “triumph” and you would think that having had this triumph should serve me well, giving me confidence about my future.  But when I remember that time in my life, I feel an obligation to be complete, to not cherry-pick the good moments. It seems pretty important to also remember that I dropped out after two years and the direction of my life changed. This brings up a sense of loss for what I could have had. Yes, things worked out pretty well in the end and I’ve had many blessings. Yes, I know how to take a positive view of my life and I’m able to feel good about where I am now. But there’s still a little bit of effort involved in maintaining a positive narrative. So many years after my life changed course, it can still feel like I am defending my choice to myself, and that’s tiring. 

What would be so wrong about my remembering that time in 1998 – when I got into grad school and was full of excitement and energy for my path forward – without bringing any attention to the fact that I dropped out in the year 2000? What would be so wrong about focusing only on that positive moment in 1998 and deriving joy and inspiration from it without feeling the need to consider the full picture of how my academic story ended? What would be so wrong about feeling that pride again without deciding immediately that it must be canceled out by the memory of what happened next? The point of this would not be to confabulate, it would not be to imagine that I had stayed in school. Rather, the point would be to stop thinking so much about what happened later and instead to appreciate the beginning as an isolated moment in time.

Of course, nothing would be wrong with doing this, because although we have expectations of ourselves regarding memory – we also have a “freedom of memory” that we don’t always avail ourselves of.

And why don’t we avail it? There is a fine line between remembering something in the solitude of one’s mind and rehearsing the way we might explain it to another person – for me, these are much the same. Perhaps I constrain my own reminiscence by my sense of what other people would understand if I were telling it to them. While thinking back to my excitement and joy in 1998 I might be tempted to share it aloud with someone else, though there might be no one in the room, but if there were, they’d say “So what happened next, how did it go?” and I’d then have to explain it. Even if I have no intent to actually voice my reminiscence, I might still feel I need to prepare that explanation, just in case. And this is interesting, because it means that my own understanding of myself is shaped by my idea of what other people would understand. 

There’s also a sense that I need to be complete in my recollection so the story will make sense to me. How did I get to where I am now? If I were to selectively focus on my joy in 1998 without also drawing any attention to my choice in 2000, it would be exceedingly difficult to understand why I’m not in a university right now doing research and teaching, but instead I’m a free agent… writing essays like this one, taking photographs, trying to make music.

Third, there may be a dynamic that’s similar to the “murderer” scenario from before, where although I committed no crime whatsoever in dropping out, I am still responsible for the outcome of the situation. There’s a feeling that I must own my role in it. The excitement of my grad-school entrance is not my “right” to feel anymore. I don’t “get” to enjoy that happiness anymore because it was I who “threw it all away.” So the story goes.

This tangle of thoughts surrounding past events and how I should recall them seems almost impossible to unravel at times. And this is where meditation has offered me a new option in the past year that I was never aware I had before. Meditation teaches me that I can let all of my inner narration quiet down and turn to silence – not being resolved or sorted out but simply being left to dissipate. In the context of meditation, we can direct our focus to a chosen object in memory, contemplating that one thing alone, and releasing all of the thoughts and mental chatter that it triggers.

If I’m remembering my life publicly, I should not omit all the negatives to create a story full of convenient holes, but meditation is a safe context in which to avail the freedom of memory, to use my memory in whatever way I might find healing.

Here is a meditation exercise I am using. First, I think of the good beginnings I’ve experienced in the course of my life so far. As I do this, I try to notice the “buts” that follow. It might go like this:

I got into grad school BUT I dropped out. I wrote a novel BUT I abandoned it. I started a startup BUT it failed. I released a music album BUT no one noticed. I wrote an essay BUT no one read it.

Next, I remove the buts:

I got into grad school. I wrote a novel. I started a startup. I released an album. I wrote an essay.

Finally, I see if it’s possible to savor the feelings of those beginnings, and to acknowledge I am the same person who had the passion and initiative to start all those things and I still have that passion and initiative. It makes me feel like myself again.

The value of an exercise like this is that it can help us reclaim the benefits of good things that have happened in our lives — the pleasures that have been obscured, the achievements that we are now disconnected from, the relationships that couldn’t continue. Instead of being burdened by the riches of the past, we can draw strength from those people, events and experiences. We can let them help us. This doesn’t make it unnecessary to think about the outcomes that didn’t go as we hoped – to examine and learn from those outcomes – but there is a time and place for that learning. If we can think of the beginnings without the outcomes for just a moment, we can see that there is more goodness in our past than we are appreciating, and there is more to be proud of than we are allowing for. It is within this pride, rather than in any regret which clouds it, where we can find the surest impetus to learn.

It is as if each of us is carrying a treasure chest of positive experiences, but it is heavy and it is closed, and it’s draining our strength. Our best experiences have turned into problems, their value has turned into a cost.

What we can do is set the chest down and open it and enjoy the sparkle of the jewels inside. Then with the chest lying on the floor, still open, we can walk forward, and keep walking, and notice that we don’t have to carry the chest. Magically, those jewels follow us wherever we go.