Introducing #MindfulMonday on the blog, where we aim to provide our readers with a little dose of zen to start each week, excerpted from David Schiller’s See Your Way to Mindfulness. This week, we ask you to come up with new ways to describe familiar objects.
Names are brilliant shortcuts to efficient communication, but they often prevent us from seeing the individual identity of an object. When we hear the sentence “She climbed a tree,” most of us will begin by imagining a generic tree, like a dictionary photo. Here’s an interesting—or perhaps maddening—exercise to sharpen your verbal powers of seeing: Have a conversation with someone without ever using the names for things. How would you say “Hand me that pencil?” or “I think it’s time you mowed the lawn.” You’d have to come up with creative descriptors, and perhaps your conversation partner will have a different understanding of a particular object’s purpose (that’s the maddening part). Either way, it leads to a richer version of describing what you see.
By calling it a rose, it may prevent you from seeing further. What happens when you call it ‘a flower with thorns’?
About the Book:
Seeing, really seeing, is like meditation. In a world filled with distraction, seeing mindfully is a way to pay attention, to hit pause and find calm by focusing on what’s directly in front of us. See Your Way to Mindfulness is a gift book of inspiration and instruction to help readers open their eyes—and their “I’s.” Written by David Schiller, author of the national bestseller The Little Zen Companion, it’s a collection of quotes, prompts, exercises, meditations—married with photographs and drawings that bring the words to life.
The quotes are from artists, Buddhists, philosophers, poets, and more, all centered on the theme of how “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” (Marcel Proust). The short, playful exercises and prompts—like Seeing in the Rain, Eye Spy with My Open I, Spend 30 Minutes Taking a Five-Minute Walk, Get Lost—are designed to disrupt routine and inspire readers to see for themselves. Some of the exercises involve drawing, writing, and taking photographs, opening a path to creativity as well as showing how to engage in the moment.
Think of it as the Zen of seeing—a new way to look at the world afresh and rediscover joy in the everyday.
Buy the Book
Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Workman
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