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This old David Foster Wallace commencement speech has been making the rounds since his suicide last September. I finally got around to reading it, and it struck me immediately that the whole thing was about mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense:
Probably the most dangerous thing about c ... Continue reading »
Probably the most dangerous thing about c ... Continue reading »
7 months ago
this is both fascinating and deep. i hadn't read the speech before nor do i know a whole lot about the author, but i cannot help but think that DFW couldn't have possibly lived his whole well-connected well-read life without reading some Buddhist philosophy at some point.
and the fascinating thing here to me is that it stuck for him. mindfulness (which this undoubtedly is all about) was on his mind, clearly.
this sentence in particular out of the address is superb and worthy of repeating over and over again:
"It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience."
it stuck, yet, was he practicing it himself? there is a *critical* difference, as you point out, from reading, thinking about and even "understanding" mindfulness on the one hand and practicing it on the other. the former takes curiosity and spurts of motivation while the latter takes sustained devotion and discipline.
its not fair for me to claim to know that because of the outcome of his life. because of his ultimate choice, he wasn't practicing. i don't. how could i know? even if we had the exact same mind, how could i say what state he found himself in at that moment?
but i do know that for myself personally and for hundreds of thousands of others (if not millions) who participate in mindfulness, the decision he made would be much more likely without a steady reliable practice in place. after all, at least in the tradition of Vipassana -- the original form practice which Gotama Buddha passed on -- two of the other biggest lessons one seeks to cultivate in a practice beyond mindfulness is equanimity (unbiasing) and Anicca (impermanence of all phenomena, including emotional states).