Most of our lives we are absorbed in doing: in getting things done, in going rapidly from one thing to the next, or in multitasking — attempting to juggle a bunch of different things at the very same time.
Often our lives become so driven that we are moving through our moments to get to better ones at some later point. We live to check things off our to-do list, then fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, only to jump up the next morning to get on the treadmill once again. This way of living, if you can call it living, is compounded by all the ways in which our lives are now driven by the ever-quickening expectations we place on ourselves and that others place on us and we on them, generated in large measure by our increasing dependence on ubiquitous digital technology and its ever-accelerating effects on our pace of life.
If we are not careful, it is all too easy to fall into becoming more of a human doing than a human being, and forget who is doing all the doing, and why.
This is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness reminds us that it is possible to shift from a doing mode to a being mode through the application of attention and awareness. Then our doing can come out of our being and be much more integrated and effective. What is more, we cease exhausting ourselves so much as we learn to inhabit our own body and the only moment in which we are ever alive — this one.