Mindfulness: This film will keep you SAFE

I go through my morning on autopilot, navigating the traffic without thought. I know this route and I have a pretty good understanding of how the traffic is going to behave at this time and in this part of town, even though the cars might differ. So I am not watching myself drive. A basic level of concentration and automatic motor skills are seeing me through. My attention barely increases for the slightly wonky street sign, the speeding driver, the guy whose truck is driving him because all of this happens every day. 

The first stage of mindfulness is to notice the thoughts that you are having. You are still driving the car, but you take a moment to look at the road, the drivers, the scenery and examine what’s going on.

The first thing that happens when I am told to do this is that my brain goes completely silent. Like a cat presented with a microphone, getting any sound out at all is an exercise in futility. 

“Notice your thoughts.”

My brain looks back at me with inscrutable majesty. I am not having any thoughts! I gaze at the landscape of my mind, arid and dusty as the plains in a cowboy film, a lone tumbleweed thought drifting across the scene.

“I am amazing at this.”

This stage doesn’t last. Thoughts are sneaky. They wait for you to look away from the mindfulness and then they sidle. It is moments later that I am thinking about my reasons for attempting to learn mindfulness, and wondering how I am doing.

But this doesn’t count as thinking because it is about mindfulness, right?

I wonder how long it will take for this to have an effect. I focus on my breathing, and then plan lunch.

Quieting the brain is hard work. Initially I manage a few seconds at a time, and the process of trying to sit still for even 5 minutes and “be present” causes my brain to squirm like a cat in a jacket.

Evidence shows that spending time in the present moment is mentally good for us. This requires repeated tiny moments of focus throughout the day. We have to notice our thoughts, interrupt them, and become aware of the present moment, both in our bodies and around us. This is extremely difficult and worse, it has zero cache.

Society is set up to appreciate feats of strength and bravery. Our willingness to celebrate achievements relates almost directly to how physically impressive they are. Run 10km? Your family will come out if they live nearby, but they might be tetchy about it. Run a marathon? Strangers will applaud you in the street. 

One of the worst aspects of mindfully interrupting your thoughts, besides the lack of a cool name? It is as hard as running a marathon but no one gives a shit. We are culturally conditioned to be impressed by people who can run down a buffalo but not by people who can repeatedly do tiny tasks throughout their day. Which is dumb, because primitive humans would have been fucked if neolithic Harry hadn’t been good at doing small repetitive tasks. Without camp tending and looking out for predators everyone would have been eaten by tigers while on fire.

We ought to be celebrating this kind of exertion. We should rock up to the kitchen with a swagger.

“I just spent thirty seconds mindfully noticing a tree. For the 8th time today. I am on a ROLL.”

There should be high fives and admiring glances. Someone should immediately bring us a beer.

Instead, we have to bench press our own brains without any ego massage to help us along.

Once I begin to interrupt my thoughts instead of simply experiencing them on autopilot, I face the challenge of noticing what I spend most of my time thinking about. 

There is an entire Inside Out type film studio in my brain that shoots endless movies without any oversight from me. I’ve never gone down to the film lot.

Now I am visiting and I don’t like it at all.

I notice that I am having a thought that seems unhelpful. I slow down my golf cart, smack in the middle of a film shoot. The director is sat in a special directors chair with a megaphone. Two cameramen sit precariously in special camera seats high up in the air. I pull to a stop and take a closer look.

“So….what’s happening here then?” I say awkwardly.

The director looks at me, with an expression of mingled fury, impotence and guilt. This is the face you wear when confronted by the major shareholder of the studio who has no idea how filming works, or that you have 50 scenes to shoot this morning, and yet can flatten your career like a bug on a pavement. 

“We’re shooting a series of shorts. Upstairs put in a last minute request for anxiety,” he looks sideways, not mentioning that I am “upstairs” and ought to know. “There wasn’t any more information…” 

unspoken a loud “again” echoes between the lines. 

“...So we’re just making up the storylines as we go.”

“Ah,” I look at the set. An oven is gently smoking. 

“And this is…”

“I Left the Oven On.”

“But I didn’t leave the oven on though?” I pose it as a question. The director looks very stern. 

“This is a fantastically subtle scene from one of our best writers. If you did leave the oven on, and burnt alive 80 year old Barbara in flat A, think how terrible that would be. It’s a very emotional scene.” 

“Due to complaints, Barbara is rescued at the last moment,” a cameraman chips in.

“My best work is always censored,” grumbles the director.

“It’s very layered,” an assistant adds supportively, passing the director a coffee cup.

“It’s horrible. And ridiculous,” I say. 

“Exactly!” the director jumps out of their chair and points a finger at me. “We have to think of this scenario in order to prevent it! Our lack of vigilance makes this all but inevitable. We’re hoping for an outcome where we obsessively check the oven.”

I turn to the other set, where two actors resembling my partner and I are lounging. As the director turns to see what I’m looking at, they straighten up and look serious.

“And this one?”

The director shrugs. “That’s just a rerun of the argument you had on Tuesday about filling the water filter.”

“But we’ve been playing those all week!”

“Oh that’s just the first edition with improved dialogue at your end. This time we’ve recast the boyfriend. Darryl is a much more emotional actor and we think that’s got teeth.”

Darryl bursts into tears on cue.

“That never happened!”

“It’s a much more dynamic scene if he’s upset.”

“But it’s not true!”

“How do you know?” the director says, slyly.

“Oh shit,” I say. He’s right. What if my partner was upset? I cast my mind back over the memory and the cameramen swivel.

“Stop it!”

My thoughts are bananas and I never knew it because I was too busy having them to notice. I worry all the time about everything. The director in my brain in charge of anxiety-filming is a workaholic self-titled “genius” that forces everyone to shoot around the clock. They make their staff ugly cry in the filmlot toilet. A lot of their work is focused on current events, chronic illness, unkind words, missed appointments. The worst projected outcomes of my misfortunes are blockbusters with many sequels. But if I don’t have anything to fixate on, they just start making stuff up. I have caught myself envisioning stories in which giant fen raft spiders populate our plumbing, in which my hand cream is recalled for containing flesh eating bacteria but no one tells me, in which it turns out my brain has dissolved into a liquid that is miraculously still functioning. I’ve envisioned my partner dying in every possible way, including accidental poisoning and tripping over a shoe. If he knew how much time I spend imagining his death he would leave me for his own safety. I caught myself last week having a 20 minute conversation with an invisible friend defending myself from the accusation that I had forgotten her child's name. None of it is remotely relatable or likely.

“We’re going to shoot an argument with the mother, following on from the fight about the upcoming holiday…”

“Boss, boss” the assistant director runs in.

“Don’t interrupt me when I’m envisioning!”

“But…that fight was resolved. They had a phone call this morning and sorted it out.”

“Nuts.” The director frowns.

“All right. This is what we’re going to do.” he says in a confident voice. The film crew gather around, responding to his tone. “Remember that venomous snail we read about, from Australia?”

“Ummmm..” the assistant replies

“Picture this. The beach is covered in cone shells. The family are walking the dogs. As they reach the middle of the beach they realise their dilemma. Cone snails crawling everywhere. The dogs are barking, the whole family bunching together on the last safe piece of sand…evil marine snails closing in…”

The assistant director coughs. “”Errr…”

“What?” the director spits.

“Would the holiday home cancelling, or maybe bad weather not be more…believable?”

The director throws his pencil at the assistant.

“I didn’t take this job to be convincing. I’m here to make ART!”

Why does my brain only envision terrible outcomes? The purpose of mindfulness is to encourage the self to notice that nothing terrible is happening in the present moment, or at least that a lot of non terrible things are happening. This helps us to see that we are not moments from death in a jungle full of monsters, and encourages us to stop engaging with the brain as it tries to protect us by listing bad outcomes.

We can shut down our negative thoughts by sternly telling the brain to stop. I decide to bring the scene to a close in an imaginative way, by writing a quick, positive ending before moving onto the “being present” stage. 

My brain is resistant to this.

This is understandable when factoring in my internal director. I am asking Cronenberg to shoot Disney.

“Okay, so I have some notes.” I stride out of my buggie, projecting confidence.

The director is shooting the last few scenes of My Flat is Poisoned by Spores. It’s slated to win an Emmy so the whole team is working triple time. They glower at me.

“We’re doing the last scene,” the director says in a faux “sweet” voice.

“Great, we can pin this on the end,” I say, breezily. He sighs and turns his fearsome brow in my direction.

“Let’s hear it,” he gives a regal wave, as if I’m pitching.

“So in the end it turns out the flat doesn’t have spores.”

“The flat…doesn’t have spores? Just…doesn’t?” the director says the last word the way other people say “vomit.”

“Just doesn’t!” I say cheerily. “And, there’s an additional twist.”

Ten pairs of eyes stare at me blankly.

“The doorbell rings, and all my friends have come to visit…with scones!”

There is a thunderstruck silence.

“Is it an intervention? Are we dying?” the assistant director says.

“No, no.”

“Is one of them dying?”

“No.”

“Is this some kind of body snatcher situation?”

“What? Just…no. The friends bring scones and marmalade jam. Everyone has tea.”

“This is terrible cinema,” the director rumbles, menacingly. “There’s no theme, it doesn’t prepare us for the risks of spores OR unexpected friends bearing cake. Anything could be happening while this film is running! It’s not safe!”

“We are doing it,” I say, firmly.

It’s not safe.

There is a part of our brain that believes it is not safe to assume that things are going to go well. We can be certain of horror and pleasantly surprised, or we can be hopeful of scones and unpleasantly surprised. The brain will always prefer to prepare for unpleasant surprises because it confers a sense of control, even if it means envisioning the worst. This control is an illusion because we cannot be ready for every eventuality. It’s not possible to predict all of the outlandish and ludicrous things that can happen to humans going about their day. From all the things that can fall on our heads, to the tiny angry animals that can attack us anywhere, at any time, or the myriad ways we can insult people without realising it. Our bodies are bodged together meat machines, every device in our home is a ticking time bomb, every object we put into our mouths involves a huge team of disparate individuals to grow, manufacture and ship, any one of them capable of psychopathy. Nothing can ever be entirely safe, but living in fear of every possible outcome makes us unwell.

My attempt to interfere with the plot of my future ruminations is ultimately flawed. Wrestling my inner director for control of the future is tiring, and winning creates a new set of problems.

After shooting the film “No Spores, Only Scones” I find myself disappointed with my friends for their failure to appear at my door with baked goods. On seeing a friend a few weeks later, there is an air of mistrust. They probably think that I am preoccupied, or affected by the heat. They could never imagine the semi-conscious thought passing through my head.

“I was expecting you a week ago, with JAM.”

For the sake of my relationships, I switch to a more traditional method. When I notice myself lost in the latest epic, “This Bout of Tiredness Means My Illness is Worsening And I can Prove it With Bullet Points,” I bring myself into the present. While I am tired, it becomes immediately obvious that quite a lot of things about the present moment aren’t horrifying. The tea, the sunshine, a flock of parakeets burbling to one another in a tree. It becomes difficult to connect to the plotline that the sensation in my body is part of an overarching tragedy plot. The sinister music is not actually playing. Right now, I am safe. Does mindfulness mean everything is going to turn out okay? No, but it gives me a lot more morale, focus and energy to deal with the present as it emerges.

Mindfulness starts by noticing the films that my brain is releasing, ignoring the golden globes, the catchy tag line “this film will keep you SAFE” and asking the question: is this storyline making me feel happier? Is this useful to me at this moment? Is anything actionable right now? 

If not, I ditch the cinema and go bowling instead.