How do Mindfulness, awareness, and curiosity interrelate?
I was thinking about this on a long drive last week (where I often do my best thinking). I started by comparing awareness and mindfulness. Are they interchangeable? I often see them used in similar fashion. When I got home, I looked up both words in the dictionary and in various writings by spiritual leaders.
I concluded they are related, but not the same. My favorite quote is
“Mindfulness means being able to remember where you want to keep your awareness.”
While this is a Buddhist perspective, it’s also a useful distinction if you are not Buddhist. We can be aware of a lot of things, much of that is subconscious and automatic. My office window looks out into a section of forest. I’m always aware the trees are there, and usually if it’s sunny, nighttime, or windy.
But at times, I can get so focused on work that I forget all of that. Call it Deep Focus, Flow State, or whatever, it’s the ability to channel most of your attention in a single area. This is great for productivity! The champions of MOAR WORK teach how to do this for hours on end. But is that healthy? Is it even satisfying?
I would argue a balance is needed. Mindfulness is what adds that emotional and mental checks to ensure what we are focusing our awareness on has meaning. A few hours of focus work each day is great. Sixteen hours every day can be overwhelming and exhausting. If we exclude the outside world, friends, family, and nature all the time, then we disconnect from reality.
Where does Curiosity fit in?
Curiosity challenges our assumptions. Curiosity helps us look deeper into our actions and motives leading to deeper mindfulness. To extend Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s thought above, curiosity helps examine why we want to keep our awareness somewhere. Deeper awareness and mindfulness gives us more space and confidence to be curious.
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