This week Joe interviews an old college friend, Shaun Lambert, about mindfulness, wonder, and the need to ’re-perceive' God. It’s a really great interview, connecting mindfulness with spirituality in a very profound and helpful way.
A lot of it is about the need to pay attention to ourselves and the moment we’re in. Attention is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In fact I led a retreat on the subject the week before lock down happened – an event which caused us all to pay greater attention in a whole new way!
So, a lot of what Shaun said resonated with me. It seems to me that people are beginning to realise that their ‘attention muscles’ as Shaun calls them, are starting to atrophy. Social media’s constant clamour for our attention is wearing us down. Shaun quotes someone in the interview as saying, ‘Freeing our attentional capacities from the virtual world is the number one ethical task’ and that’s certainly something I’ve been arguing for a long time, and which I have addressed in my own life. It’s the reason why I am not on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or – not that this was ever likely – TikTok.
I do post very occasionally on Mastodon, and, as you can see, I have restarted blogging. But all on my own terms. And not in any search for ‘likes’ or comments. This might, indeed, be a pointless exercise, but it helps me think through some things. It seems something of a return to the origins of blogging, when it was just about putting your thoughts out there, something I was reminded of this week, as Dave Winer’s blog celebrated its 30th anniversary. Dave’s Radio Userland software was the reason I started blogging in the first place, many, many, many years ago.
Another thing that struck me from Shaun’s interview was the ancient Christian roots of mindfulness. He quoted Ephrem the Syrian, a fourth century theologian who said that ‘when we are baptised we are clothed with the wakeful one’. Baptism is a symbolic new birth, and anyone who enters a new life or a new world is surely bound to notice everything. Time for us all to wake up to what is around us.