Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

light up the world as brightly as we want and keep
going with our lives, filling all our waking hours with
busyness, with doing. Life gives us scant time for
being nowadays, unless we seize it on purpose. We
no longer have a fixed time when we have to stop
what we are doing because there's not enough light
to do it by ... we lack that formerly built-in time we had
every night for shifting gears, for letting go of the
day's activities. We have precious few occasions
nowadays for the mind to settle itself in stillness by a
fire.
Instead, we watch television at the end of the day, a
pale electronic fire energy, and pale in comparison.
We submit ourselves to constant bombardment by
sounds and images that come from minds other than
our own, that fill our heads with information and trivia,
other people's adventures and excitement and
desires. Watching television leaves even less room in
the day for experiencing stillness. It soaks up time,
space, and silence, a soporific, lulling us into
mindless passivity. "Bubble gum for the eyes," Steve
Allen called it. Newspapers do much the same. They
are not bad in themselves, but we frequently conspire
to use them to rob ourselves of many precious
moments in which we might be living more fully.