Awareness and Self Awareness

In the last few weeks I've engaged in several conversations with a good friend of mine about awareness or "mindfulness." We've used these terms to name one of the goals of meditation, and we might say that we both strive to be more mindful. But one of my brothers pointed out to me that this language can be empty. While we are awake, we are conscious. To be conscious is to be aware. We are only completely unaware (if at all) when we sleep. We are mindful of something all the time.

Does being "mindful" mean being mindful of everything that there is? – or of as much of that as one can be? Or should we perhaps specify the things of which we think we ought to be mindful as often or as continuously as possible?

I am with Stephanie in advocating a greater mindfulness of the pleasures available to us. Today was my birthday, and I took a variety of pleasures: I had a sense of accomplishment; I took pleasure in the company I kept; I took gustatory pleasure (paying special attention to the smells of my food and drink); I noted with pleasure the changing colors of the sky as the sun went away; and I marked a certain freedom that I felt (linked both to the day's accomplishments and to the pleasure I took in my good company) as I walked out into the evening air.

I advocate not only knowing and noting one's pleasures, but identifying and holding onto the pleasures that one imagines, whether one aims ever to achieve them or whether they are fantasy purely. In fact, I have been keeping a kind of journal of my pleasures, specifically erotic ones. This document doesn't seem especially interesting to me now, but if I reread it in a year or more, I expect to learn myself better.

One Day at a Time

It occurred to me only in reading the post of 8.13.09 that "journalism," etymologically, is a daily practice. Stephanie writes, "I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing ‘news-worthy’ is happening there." I am inclined to reply, "Yes! Journalism can be precisely itself by knowing and noting the daily life of a people or a place. Journalism isn’t the same as news, and it can go on productively (fruitfully? more on that another time) when there is no news at all.”

But this reply is too simple, or maybe just wrong. It seems to me that “journalism,” used colloquially, includes all of the following: the news, what we call features, human interest, exposé, and opinion. There are probably other subgenres I’m not thinking of. If this is right, then my idea that journalism can be “precisely itself” looks misleading and absurd. At the same time, I think I’ve stumbled on one of the valuable features of the journal, which of course has the same etymology.

For all the difficulty I have defining journalism, it still seems opposed to the journal in one clear way. While the news elements of journalism can operate on the very limited time scale of the day, as in “day after day” – while they should consist primarily of reportage – the other kinds of journalism I’ve mentioned all strive to build coherent and compelling narratives from events that follow one after another without, in fact, being part of a story. It is the news that resembles the journal, while the other forms of journalism represent the powerful human impulse to impose a story pattern (beginning, middle, and end, say) on unpatterned, unauthored occurences. Journals can be compelling because when we reread them, they force us out of the narratives we’ve constructed. They drop us back into what I’ll call the diurnal mode. They call our attention to the facts of a day, and simultaneously they remind us of the fact that we’ve incorporated those facts, fictionally, into a story of a life.

To return to Stephanie's question: we can practice journalism both by hunting down stories that other people have already shaped or rough-hewn, or we can rely on our own immersion in a place, community, or cultural-reality – and write stories that are therefore more totally our own. They may be wiser, but they also may be no more true.