S2E23: On the Practice of Mindfulness in Professional Life

It seems to me that we moderns have perfected the curious art of being perpetually elsewhere. Our bodies may sit at our desks, our hands may type upon keyboards or sign documents, but our minds—ah, our minds are fugitives, forever escaping the present moment to wander in the imagined future or linger in the remembered past. I have observed this tendency in myself with a mixture of amusement and dismay. Often, while engaged in some professional task, I discover that my thoughts have absconded without my permission, leaving behind only the mechanical movements of my body. My eyes may scan documents, but their meaning eludes me; my ears may register the voices of colleagues, but their words dissolve before reaching understanding. This division between presence and absence, between the physical reality of work and the mental reality of distraction, has become the unexamined condition of our professional lives.