My Horrible Little Habits

Recently, I decided it was time to formalize some mindfulness practices to make my efforts more committed. I’d been attempting the ten breaths and meditating occasionally and doing intentional, sequential relaxation in bed (which puts me to sleep expeditiously) but that was on a “whenever I feel like it” basis and consequently haphazard. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhism is big on the idea of a bell of mindfulness, which can be a cat’s meow, your office chair squeaking, a loved one’s face, an actual bell, whatever. Pretty much any phenomenon can be used as a reminder to pause what you’re doing and take several breaths with awareness, or do a body scan, or repeat a mantra, or all three, so I decided to start that way.

The first proper rule I lit upon was that anytime I want to pick up my phone, I have to take several unrushed in and out breaths, decide what I’m using it for, and then stick to my plan. When I pull this off, it feels amazing. Inevitably my thumb sometimes gets away from me and performs its routine of checking every possible thing there is to check and then rechecking them until some sufficient distraction—new post, new email, new text—presents itself. But it’s rarer than I would have expected, especially since I’ve watched this compulsive pattern many times while peering over a stranger’s shoulder on the subway. There’s no service in the tunnel, but they open Instagram, scroll for five frames, close it, check their texts (none are new), reread the last three old messages in the latest thread, close it, open Instagram, (still no service), slash their thumb up and down in dissatisfaction, close Instagram, open that stale text thread. Hunting, hunting, hunting for the relief of stimulation. Those poor souls! What an affliction.

Of course, it never feels that serious when I’m the one doing it. A long time ago, before I took Twitter off my phone, I would sometimes open the app, close it, and immediately reopen it with pure physical reflex, like I wasn’t making choices from within my own body, like I’d coughed so hard I’d gagged, like I’d just stepped on a rake, stepped off, then stepped back on it again.¹ When I caught myself doing that, I’d usually laugh because haha, how silly. And it is funny but, like almost everything these days, profoundly unsettling at the same time.

Exerting control when it came to my phone was quite the high. So I made other screen resolutions: no holding my phone while I’m talking to someone in person even if I’m not *looking* at the phone, no turning on some movie or show unless I really want to watch it, etc. My bar for pleasure is in some ways very low but it truly feels great to realize I don’t have to trawl for something to watch when I can just turn off the TV and do something different instead, something that would be less pointless and more enriching or at least more (i.e. actually) enjoyable. Like, wow, did I just invent reclaiming my whole freaking life? Did I just invent empowerment? I should write a book about this. People need to know about the “can do something different.”

But lurking around the edges of the easy wins was a challenge I did not want to face...the challenge of eating a meal with no distractions.

For years, I’ve periodically told myself that I should concentrate more on my food. I should savor the taste, chew slowly, never eat with my eyes on a moving image. My motivations for adopting these behaviors would have been vanity- and insecurity-based. I believed women’s magazines when they said that these tricks would help me feel less hungry and more full, thereby losing or at least maintaining weight. But eating mindfully is encouraged by Buddhists for almost unbearably beautiful reasons, like an encounter with interconnectedness, and the eventual realization of emptiness and no-self. I cried helplessly when I watched a video of Brother Pháp Linh² doing his variation on Thay’s tangerine meditation:

Right away, I knew that trying to eat every meal with this sort of concentration was impossible for me. At least, impossible right now. I knew because when Brother Pháp Linh said, “you have to stop,” with his little smile, I laughed like he’d said, “you have to send me your social security number.” I felt my whole being say nah. And I believe his little smile, verging on a faint chuckle, was because he knows stopping is a huge ask disguised as the most modest one, a request so sneakily audacious as to be absurd. I’m not industrious—I’m often downright lazy—but apparently I love being distracted. I love the illusion of multitasking even if I’m multitasking frivolous actions that have no benefit to the rest of the world, like reading a bad romance novel while eating candy or listening to a Housewives podcast while rewriting the same to-do list I’ve written for the past nine days, this time with two tasks omitted and three added.

So I compromised with myself and my overwhelming, visceral horror at the notion of only and exclusively eating a meal, by starting with desserts. If I wanted to eat a dessert, which is a permanent state of being for me, I would have to eat it with concentration. I had to pay attention to the taste and texture. I had to think about all the people who’d made the dessert possible, the ingredients and the preparation and the packaging and the shipping. Maybe think about the insects in the soil that grew the flour, the clouds that rained on it. I had a brownie in the cabinet at the time of this resolution, and brownies for me typically last a max of, I don’t know, 14 hours from purchase to ingestion, depending on how many there are and if I know that they’re there. Soon, I figured, I’d be mindfully eating like a champ.

Reader, when I tell you I avoided this brownie for the next two and a half days, I mean I avoided it like it was an expired egg sandwich. I did not even want to think about it. Here are some activities that appealed to me more than attending to the food I’d be eating from first bite to last:

• cleaning a toilet

• getting multiple medicinal injections

• confronting someone who is out of line

This is sort of an unfair list because truth be told I enjoy cleaning and getting shots, and I sort of like fighting too, but you get the picture. If I really want a brownie, I primly reasoned at the start, I’ll have no problem sitting down and giving it my full attention. Turns out, I did not really want the brownie! When I finally ate it, it still wasn’t out of desire but out of obligation, knowing I had to bite the bullet (brownie) and stop trying to get out of being mindful.

You might be thinking, “there are more important things, Madam, than your ability to conscientiously consume a dessert.” And I agree completely, you’ve made an excellent point. But this is a real how you do anything is how you do everything³ situation. Because, if I may say something else we’re all thinking, it’s absolutely bananas for me to mulishly resist eating with quiet concentration no matter how delicious or appealing or desired the food is. There might be some psychological sensitivities at play like residual body image or eating disorder issues but I’m 95% sure my resistance is about old-fashioned habit energy: multiple decades of not doing what I’m now trying to do, for multiple times a day. The issue isn't the food, it’s the stopping. And if I can’t overcome a habit this low stakes, if I can’t stop for 5 or 8 or 10 minutes to do an act that brings me pleasure, what hope do I have for managing actual challenges? If I can’t do this, what can I do that’s worth doing?

So I permitted myself a little crutch, just for now. It’s astounding how much it helps. I’ll sit down with my book or notepad near the food but I won’t open it; I won’t read or write anything until I’m finished. It will just be there for reassurance, like a child’s security blanket, until the time when it doesn’t feel so scary to sit down without it anymore. Yes, this is humbling! And instructive, for me anyway, about myself. I’m sorry it sounds (is) so stupid. Remember when I was crushing it with the phone stuff? Those were better times.

Sister True Dedication says that whenever stopping is really hard, she tells herself “stopping must be the action of heroes!” and it bolsters her determination. She also tells herself that her difficulty comes in part from her conditions, the people who came before her and the society she’s in now. One suggestion to assist and deepen any form of stopping—mindful breathing, walking meditation—is to think about your ancestors doing it with you. Was your grandfather able to walk unhurriedly and with happiness? If he did, he did it because he liked it, and you can let him walk again through your steps. If he didn’t, you have an opportunity he did not, and you can take it for yourself and for him.

I don’t have much connection to or even information about previous generations of my family, but my mom is a frantically busy person who doesn’t like to sleep, let alone sit still or be quiet. Sometimes her exhaustion knocks her out while she’s upright on the couch, and I think sometimes, like me, she makes herself meditate, but it doesn’t come easy. It’s very affecting to imagine eating my food with care and concentration on behalf of my mother—orphaned when she was six; divorced when her children were so young; single throughout their upbringing—who probably finds it even harder to do than I, and for much better reasons. I should do it for her. And that may be the thought that gets me to leave the book security blanket behind.

1  I probably did and maybe still do this with my inbox but, even pre-Elon, it felt extra embarrassing when the magnetic app in question was Twitter.

2  The only way I know to see this exact video is to sign up for the next Plum Village climate course which will be offered sometime next year but there is so much other material made available online and on their app for free, from Brother Pháp Linh and others.

3  Incredibly obnoxious aphorism, especially when it’s true.