Mindfulness - in the now, man !

“Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

Wi’ murdering pattle!”

I suspect most readers are not that fluent in Scots dialect, and so let me explain this first verse of the 1785 poem To a Mouse by Robert Burns. The poem is subtitled On Turning up her Nest with the Plough, and this verse refers to the mouse being startled by Burns’s plough demolishing her nest. Burns tries to reassure her that he has no intent to chase and kill her and that it was just an accident.

There’s a line in this poem that you might recognize as it is often trotted out after so-called black swan events; you know, like financial crashes and pandemics and stuff like that. It goes: “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley,” or as translated from the Scots dialect, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong.” This line has entered into popular culture, first via the John Steinbeck novel Of Mice and Men, and in more recent references, as in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series. The phrase is an appropriate sentiment for these times, as the world economy and many people’s way of life has been upended by COVID and related impositions. But, as always, if you dig deeper, there is so much more richly meaning-imbued material to sink our intellectual teeth into. Which is kind of what we do in this column.

The final verse of To a Mouse, the one following the famous “of mice and men” verse, delivers the ultimate searing insight of the poem; indeed, I believe one of the greatest insights of Scottish or English literature. Burns is still sitting comfortably atop his plough, with the mouse’s home and possessions scattered across the field and its former occupant no doubt hidden, trembling in an unfamiliar hole in the ground, when he delivers the following oration to our homeless rodent:

“Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me

The present only toucheth thee:

But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.

On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,

I guess an' fear!”

Wait what? After wreaking sudden havoc, the big clumsy Scotsman is basically saying to the poor little evicted mouse: “Hey I may have come out of nowhere and destroyed your home and way of life, but you are actually fortunate compared to me. You live only in the present. But me, poor human that I am, look back and bemoan the bad things that happened to me in the past, and look forward with anxiety about what might happen in the future”. And of course, he’s right, and that’s a large part of why we like animals so much, especially our cats and dogs. They never worry about the future or agonize about the past. Humans? Well, worry and agony are among our specialties, along with taking selfies and furtively checking social media. This fact has not gone unnoticed by others.

Let's move over a continent and go a little more mainstream. Walt Whitman (yes, for whom the bridge into Philly from NJ was named, not the other way around, I think.) wrote in Song of Myself:

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,

I stand and look at them long and long. 

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,”

I must say, I’m right there with Walt and Robbie. Animals are, if anything, in the now, all the time. I’ve been living with boxer dogs for 30 years now and they are operating 100% in the present. All of their attention, focus, energy, breath, sight, listening, sixth sense, seventh sense, everything really, is devoted to whatever is happening right now. Not just now or in a second, but now. And you know the way they (dogs) look at you, it’s like – “Hey dude, are you with me? Are you seeing this rabbit on our front lawn right now? Hey, stop thinking about work or your jagged chipped tooth, or that girl on the train – there’s a rabbit, can you see it?”. Of course, a cottage industry has grown up around teaching, encouraging, even shaming humans to operate in the present, in the now. And of course, that’s so hard, for a few reasons.

Humans have had a reasonably successful evolutionary story, due, in part, to our ability to think about and plan for the future. Some of our greatest inventions allow time to be shifted, or at least to give that illusion. Money for example can shift consumption from the future to the present, or less frequently for some, in the other direction. The past can, if you let it, last forever. The future can, if you think it hard enough, be anything you like it to be. The main problem with the present is, it doesn't last very long, in fact it keeps turning into the past at an alarming speed. You really can’t put your finger on it. So why bother, sometimes?

So where am I going with this? Here. As business people we’re all about the future, pretty much. We take investor money and promise to turn it into more money, later. That’s cool with the investor, because they don't need that money now and they’d like to have more later. In the meantime, you plan and execute and plan and execute: buying, developing, making, and selling. And the magic of capitalism creates wealth for you and the rest of the planet. You’ve got one eye on the past, promises made and lessons learned, and one eye on the future, planning, preparing, thinking. It’s a good deal overall, but what’s happening when your eyes are cast backward and forward like that? Well, it’s your life. But, what about the rabbit on the lawn? That’s the challenge of being a human. You need three eyes; the human eyes, like Robbie and Walt have, keeping a watch on things in the past and future and your boxer-dog eye in the middle, locked in on that rabbit, in the now. You know that Zoom call you were on this morning, and that one lady was looking down at her phone half the time? (Maybe you were, too?) She was somewhere else altogether. Maybe she was texting the guy who does the landscaping not to come tomorrow; no doubt important. But the rabbit was on the lawn for that Zoom call – otherwise it would not have been scheduled. Now if this lady found it uninteresting, then perhaps this particular rabbit was not relevant to her and so she really should not have even been on the call. Or maybe the call was a waste of time for everyone. Maybe it was scheduled for no good reason and the rabbit was not there for anyone. And so, you are in this hazy “now” in which no one is focusing on the matter at hand, instead everyone is thinking preferentially about the future or the past. 

So yes, I guess I’m concluding we need three eyes as humans. No worries, eastern philosophies have got my back on this one. Some western ones, too. Try it. Now. 

Locked in..