In Praise of Spacing Out

New York Magazine:

The only time I’ve ever missed a flight, I was physically at the airport. But my mind was … not. I was wandering through the bookstore, lost in thought, my daydreams apparently intense enough to drown out both the final boarding call and my own name over the paging system.

This kind of stuff happens to me with disheartening regularity, and it’s something I feel especially bad about these days, now that mindfulness — the ability to tether your thoughts to the present moment — has become such a huge part of the cultural conversation. It seems like every other day, there’s another book or study published on the benefits of keeping your conscious steadfastly in the here and the now. Congressmen talk about it. So do NFL teams. Even kids are encouraged to practice mindfulness. At the same time, the cult of productivity continues to grow. We’re encouraged to have more productive mornings and commutes, and even Sundays are becoming a day to squeeze in just a little more structure.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine