Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [34]
But this exorcism lands us immediately in the trap of negative anticipation: deciding prematurely not to do something. By a commitment not to make the telephone call, we purchase peace of mind at the cost of leaving an important chore undone. Peace of mind, however, may be had for free if only we cease to divide. We would enjoy our dinner at least as much if we simply put the issue of the telephone call entirely out of mind. There’s no need to make a decision yet. If we approach the evening openly, with neither positive nor negative agendas, a moment may come when making the telephone call doesn’t seem so odious. And then it will get done without our having had to think about it beforehand. Of course there can be no guarantees—the phone call may not get made. But nothing is to be gained by excluding the possibility of an easy solution right from the start.
Saving the best for last and negative anticipation are no more than symptomatic treatments for the division disease. Ultimately the only remedy that will restore our efficiency and our capacity for pleasure is to stop dividing. The technique for achieving this cure is constant practice in doing one thing at a time. Every single affair of the day is a suitable occasion for this important exercise. When we eat, we can practice just eating. When we wash the dishes, we can practice just washing. When we balance the checkbook, we can practice just doing arithmetic. Even the most insignificant acts—walking to the store, buying a newspaper—or the most odious—cleaning the toilet— have at least this element of value, if only we choose to harvest it: they’re opportunities to practice single-mindedness.
The greater the penalty for division, the easier we find it to keep our attention on a single task. Most of us would have no difficulty keeping our undivided attention on driving down a narrow, winding mountain road on a stormy night. If life doesn’t throw enough of these challenging circumstances our way, we would benefit by creating them intentionally. There’s no more excellent tonic for division than to position ourselves halfway up a perpendicular cliff.
Once we’ve mastered the elementary exercises of remaining undivided during mountain climbing, tightrope walking, and hand-to-hand combat, we may graduate to the more demanding practices that arise in everyday life, such as eating and washing dishes. A still more advanced practice is to select an activity that is at once dull, useless, and thoroughly familiar, and to attend to it fully for a set period of time. Many of the practices that fall under the loose heading of meditation have exactly this purpose in mind. In some traditional approaches to mental development, students spend twenty minutes a day counting their breaths from one to ten over and over again. Mastery comes when they’re not distracted from the count during the entire sitting. The benefit of this activity for everyday life may not be evident to those who don’t attempt it. But neither are the benefits of lifting heavy weights and setting them down. Both are special exercises for strengthening our capacity to meet the requirements of living.
Counting breaths doesn’t sound like a very difficult assignment. But it would be astonishing to find anyone who could count her breaths for twenty minutes without previous practice. The beginner would do well to start with five minutes and gradually build up. Even at five minutes she can’t expect immediate success. Long before the time is up, she will have wandered off into the fathomless realm of her life’s unfinished business.
When we catch our mind wandering away from the count, we should simply start again with the number one, as though nothing had happened. Every time we do this, we increase our ability to remain undivided as surely as each lift of the barbell improves our physique. After two or three months of daily