Mindfulness

Mindfulness has become close to an industry in recent decades, which makes it easy to forget how old the practice is. Buddhist texts on attention are two and a half millennia old, and the Stoics kept journals for the same purpose: to notice what is actually happening in the mind before acting on it. Marcus Aurelius wrote his notes for himself, in the morning, before the day's duties.

What those traditions share is not a technique but an assumption — that we are absent from most of our own lives, and that practice can change it. The quotes on this theme that hold up are usually concrete and unsentimental: breathing, walking, one thing at a time. The ones that promise inner peace without work are generally a later addition.

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