It’s becoming ever more apparent:  We are living through an epic, planetary event and a new civilization is emerging.  Lives are upended.  Livelihoods are at stake.  Travel and freedom are curtailed or eliminated all while technological control expands exponentially.  How to survive — without despair and anxiety?

I suggest you consider Buddha’s “mindfulness.”  You have probably heard of mindfulness.  This is because of all the current mental health therapies and self-care admonitions, mindfulness now reigns supreme.  Please understand that Buddha invented mindfulness 2500 years ago.  That is how innovative and helpful your new friend Buddha is.  I urge you to learn more and begin practicing mindfulness starting today.  It brings peace, because it gives you the power to surround yourself with beauty.  It’s the best way you can pull your Mind up by its bootstraps.

Mindfulness is perhaps the unifying concept of Buddhism.  Briefly, mindfulness is remembering you should attempt to manage your thoughts.   In mindfulness, you practice doing so and your mind becomes more focused. One object is to keep your mind from running rough-shod over your life.  Without mindfulness, Buddha says, we are rather like a person on a runaway horse galloping chaotically at the beast’s own whim.  The Chinese Buddhists refer to this agitated state as having a “monkey-mind.”  Mindfulness tames the monkey-mind. It’s the way towards self-determination.

Obviously, we can’t learn all about mindfulness from a Facebook post.  But we can get a start.  I urge you to learn about it and how to practice it and suggest that if you do so more-or-less diligently for 30 days or so, you will have begun to significantly relieve your suffering and anxiety.  And then more beautiful things begin to happen.

How to start? Most know one can develop mindfulness through “meditation.”  Meditation is not a performance.  Meditation is a PRACTICE — a fun, non-stressful exercise where one attempts to remember to fill one’s mind with the beautiful present.  For beginners, it usually involves focusing on the breath. The key is everyone is incredibly bad at first.  Don’t give up! It is like doing pushups.  You may only be able to do one initially, but as you practice, your muscles very gradually become stronger.  The same is true when you exercise your mind.  You start weak but as you exercise, you gradually become strong.

Now get this: Although they didn’t use the word, in a sense many people independently discovered mindfulness during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Back then, people were suffering for many of the same reasons they are suffering now. They had to develop techniques to alleviate their worries.  After the Depression, researchers interviewed some of the people who not only made it through those years but who remained upbeat and who even prospered.

How did they do it?  There was a common theme:  When life seemed almost unbearable, they focused on living fully — but only one day at a time.  They learned that all you need do, and all you need to ask of yourself or your god or the universe, is to give you the strength to get through the present day.  Just one more day!  What to do today? They could not afford to live several days at once. They realized they would be crushed if they worried about what might happen next year or next month or perhaps even on the morrow.  In one case study, the subject boiled it down to the concept of: “I realized that every day is the beginning of a new life.”  That is a nice recipe:  EVERY DAY IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE.

Again, the final caveat.  I feel somewhat awkward writing about such topics as it suggests a sort of arrogance.  That is why I emphasize I am merely repeating what my friend Buddha has taught for over 2500 years. I am spreading the word. If I can help one person get motivated to learn about mindfulness, I know I will have managed to help someone – even as I sit here at my desk without seeing or knowing them — and it will have made taking the time to write this little essay well worth it.  But in addition, the act of writing is one of my own mindfulness practices.  When I write, I must focus on the task and crowd out worries. The same can be true of practicing a musical instrument or doing the dishes or gardening or merely walking and feeling one’s body.  There are innumerable forms of mindfulness.   Check it out!