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If you are depressed, you are living in the past; if you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
This quote from Brazilian guru Junia Bretas exceptionally summarizes much of the wisdom surrounding mindfulness and happiness. The future is ultimately uncertain and nebulous, and so it is no use spending time worrying about things that may never come to pass. The more we ruminate, the more anxious we become, and nothing productive results from worrying. This is also true with dwelling on the past. It is good to take lessons and wisdom from our past, but dwelling there for too long can make you sad — wishing for good times that are no more or fixating on memories of unhappiness and missed opportunities.
Healthier than both is living in the present, and being absorbed by the delights and challenges therein, unburdened by expectations built from the past or undue worries about how the future will play out. Indeed, data bears out the importance of present living. Since the 1970s and the start of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic, scientists have found benefits in meditation, ranging from decreased stress and alleviated pain to increases in gray matter and memory.
To live more fully in the moment, commentators and gurus usually promote things like meditation, exercise and breathing exercises. Personally, I’ve found meditation to be very helpful for self reflection and stress reduction. Fundamentally, meditation works by taking yourself inside your own head to a place where you can observe your own thoughts from a neutral perspective. Your environment can help with this inward-traverse. Nature especially helps you find peace and to focus inwards. Many people (including me) find hikes through the woods conducive to this state of reflection.
But another class of practices and experiences uses a different theory to help you live in the moment, taking you outwards rather than inwards. These kinds of practices ground you in the present because they make you forget your sense of self rather than observe it. These methods come in a plethora of forms: states of flow (where you lose yourself in a creative pursuit) are a great example, as is exercise and, even, engaging in a good conversation. But as with the previously described situations, your environment can also help take you out of yourself. In particular, vibrant city environments can promote present-living through the volume of novel stimuli they create.
The mediating factor here is the chaos of life that dense urban places distill and invoke, often through a large and eclectic assortment of people. Dunn Bros Coffee in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood in St. Paul is a perfect distillation of this. In the morning from about 7 to 11 a.m., you can watch as a constant stream of people go about their different days: a parade of dog-walkers coming in with their big furry friends, the posse of cyclists sweaty from their rides, the anxious Macalester College students desperately typing out papers. St. Paul, as a city, contains a vast diversity of people, which allows people-watching and a cosmopolitan experience that pulls you into the moment and makes you feel connected, wherever you are.
People and Chaos and Novelty
Humans are social animals. The Xhosans have the wonderful concept of Ubuntu, which claims that “a person is a person through others.” There is truth to this — we often define ourselves through our social groups, friends and acquaintances, on the human scale but also the larger one. Thus existing in the presence of others, and feeling part of a larger whole, can be personally affirming. This psychological effect can be found all over, but especially with those great masses of diverse humanity such as I find at Dunn Bros or at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis.
Existing in the presence of others can be especially effective at taking you out of yourself when you ponder the richness of each stranger’s own life and the possibilities this creates for people-watching. Each person is a universe, with an infinitely complicated web of motivations and joys and stressors, and through the chances to people-watch we get small yet fascinating glimpses into each of these. Case in point: Minnehaha Park. On any summer weekend you’ll find a dazzling array of humanity — artists creating performance art, families walking and picnicking, tourists on those ridiculous four-seated bikes — making the people-watching opportunities ever the greater. You can critique Frisbee games, observe all sorts of family dynamics, see the plethora of hippies, young and old, who make their home here.
We are wired to take cues from those around us, so on a sunny day in the park, exposed to hundreds of others laughing and making merriment, it is difficult to remove yourself from the present. Our basic psychological hardwiring leads us to do as those around us do, and therefore enjoy ourselves in the present.
Cities are also phenomenally adept at anchoring you in the present through sights, sounds and smells, the processing of which does not allow your mind any space to wander away from the here and now. Take Manhattan as a prime example. A walk through SoHo or the East Village in particular creates a constant stream of interesting shops and restaurants, varied smells wafting from each, a host of interesting things put up for sale. You see stores which exist in few other places —Goods for the Study, for instance, which makes its business off of high-quality pens, or Porto Rico Importing, which sells coffee beans cured underground through an Indian monsoon season. Vibrancy and eclecticism constantly demand attention and allow you no rest. We have brains wired to investigate and learn about our surroundings, and so when faced with environments as peculiar and novel as a complex city, we necessarily are led out of our own minds and forget ourselves.
These kinds of environments are less common in the Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul are smaller places with older populations, and there is simply less demand for high-octane, chaotic environments. Our car-centric infrastructure also hampers us in this regard. Less foot traffic means a smaller market of small zany places, meaning a far lower density of random shops to gawk at and waste money on. If you squint, though, these environments still exist in one form or another. The Mall of America in Bloomington has some interesting niche stores like anime markets and popcorn vendors; the Mall itself mimics the kinds of dense, walkable downtown environments that deploy their flashiness to take you out of your mind and lock you into the moment.
I acknowledge that the stimulation these kinds of energetic places provide does not universally promote mindfulness and present living. I have a particularly spastic mind — more broadly, my generation has largely been addled by the constant barrage of content from the internet. Others, especially at different ages, seek peaceful places; in particular, many older folks choose retirement destinations based on a desire for a more serene place. Think of the retirement communities along the beaches of Florida, in the mountains of North Carolina — or, locally, just off the nature-filled campus of St. Catherine University. I do not claim that cities spark present living in everyone, but for those whose minds have been trained on the wild dance of the information age and accustomed to the constant rush of new facts, a bustling scene can be serene.
The Energy of Life
Our wellbeing is inextricably linked to our environment in all of its senses (intellectual, social), but especially our geographical environment. The subtle ways that the built environment influences human behavior — whether to stay in or go out for the night, whether to linger with your coffee or get it to-go — have tremendous power, and one of the ways this is felt is the particular sense of stimulation that a place provides. Living in a busy place provides an inbuilt outlet for mental energy, such as a less dense suburb or small town might not. It ensures that the default is excitement and stimulation, which is largely a recipe for happiness.
I close with a scene: a Twins game on a summer night as the sun sets. Sitting in a seat in the bleachers, perhaps, you are bombarded with sights, sounds and people. The crowd maintains a low chaotic hum, those around you talk just loud enough so you can eavesdrop, and campy animations play from the jumbotron. The penetrating smells of sweat and stale beer shift as the wind swirls and blows in other odors, and, of course, paying attention to the game is a meditative exercise in and of itself.
More than anything, there is energy: borne of the critical concentration, attention and excitement of humanity in an open arena, an electricity that is highly contagious and conducive to present-living. It is theoretically possible to be anxious and ruminate at a ball game, but between the environment and the people you went with, the probability of this is infinitesimal. The same basic force — the concentration of life — that characterizes Times Square and Dunn Bros and Minnehaha Park, find their logical end in the energy and ambience of this modern Colosseum. No one is an island, and urbanity shows how the presence of others has a delightful effect on our state of mind.
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