Mindfulness practice is full of apparent paradoxes.
Many years ago I did an advanced driving course sponsored by my employer. It was way before I heard of mindfulness or took up meditation. It was all about road awareness, so there is a genuine link to mindfulness which is very much about cultivating awareness of the present moment.
One of the things I learnt was to approach obstacles (corners, roundabouts, etc.) a little more slowly. So, on approaching a bend, the instruction was to take your foot off the accelerator soon enough to slow down for the right speed to take the bend without braking, to position yourself on the road for the best view round the bend, and once in the bend consider when it is safe to accelerate. As well as being kinder on the brakes and tyres, the car is better balanced in the bend, you can move off more quickly, and often you take a shorter line round the bend. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I soon realised I was making faster progress. I was slowing down into bends, but my overall progress was faster. It was similar with roundabouts, where I would be able to judge my arrival at a roundabout so that I did not have to come to a halt if there was plenty space.
So mindfulness encourages you to slow down a little, but paradoxically you can get more done. When I first started meditating twice a day, 20 minutes in the morning and 20 in the evening, I seemed to be more focussed throughout the day. The 40 minutes meditating meant that the rest of the day was more productive – I got the time back, as well as feeling less stressed. How can that be?
When life is rushed you often make more mistakes, tire yourself out, and make more bad decisions. You also miss opportunities. I remember a very wise colleague who, when I asked her how she was coping with a new challenging job, said she was just making little piles of things to do, and then deciding which pile to work on first; she turned out to be an amazingly productive CEO of a small international standards organisation. She would not be rushed, and took the appropriate time to make decisions. (I later found out she was a yoga teacher too!).
Mindfulness practice is very much consciously slowing down to encourage a full awareness of the current situation. That way you can make the best decision. We call it responding rather than reacting. The Dalai Lama was once asked by a journalist how much he managed to meditate each day, as he seemed to be have an incredibly full schedule, and he said an hour; the journalist then asked what he did when things got really busy and he said that he meditated for two hours.
So time meditating is not lost time. It is like slowing down early before you go into a bend – in the end you get round faster and more safely. So when you feel rushed with too much to do, take a breath, pause, and choose what is most important to do next – go into your next task slowly and you might get it done faster.
