A Strategy for Mindfulness

To sum up all of life:

“the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment”

Regardless of how much has been done and what your narrow-mindedness has led you to see, there will eventually be a point in life where your youth’s due date has expired. Not many excuses remain after that.
Keep a journal: it can be of anything. Fictional descriptions for emotions only you would be able to understand, the few sweet compliments you have ever received from your socially impotent neighbor whose glasses lean more towards one side and beard that has simply been grown too long, to the awfully bitter, 2000-year-old chocolate long ago deserted inside the neverland of your kitchen closet and how difficult it has become to chew it (and your ceaseless attempts to devour it wholly, in spite of its repulsive taste).
After your jaw has become sore enough, throw away the chocolate for good and wash its odious aftertaste off from your tongue, preferably with the last of what’s left of your Colgate.
Once your mouth is free from the aromas of ancient 70% chocolate, settle down in your chair. Don’t shift around too much: you’ll get distracted. Go to YouTube and play Asaf Avidan’s Reckoning Song from your laptop on full-volume as you wait for your mother, right in the midst of answering the phone, to tell you to turn it off.
After a series of contemplative assessments (or what your teachers would unjustly label under “procrastination”), listen to your music on your headphones. Certainly not a simple decision, but considering your parents’ anger after $400 gone to nothing, do it. Absorb yourself in the vividness of passing time and how little you were able to accomplish throughout the course of your day. Try to ignore everything, or as much as you possibly can, specifically referring to the suspicious expression of your parents’ highly educated and first-class “friends” at the sight of your conversation with a boy (aka the malicious opposite sex) at the same table you must not have any contact with. Take advantage of your teacup’s needless size by hiding your face in it while pretending to take a sip of bland green tea. Indulge yourself in the pleasures of consuming packaged tea leaves imported from God-knows-where to your local café; only dip 1/4 of your biscuit into the hot liquid, else you run the risk of having it break off and dissolve into a futile mayhem of soggy crumbs nobody wants to look at and tea that is no longer worth drinking, and the entire experience will leave you with a weary sense of despondency and psychological hollowness at how even the smallest pleasures of life will break off eventually and leave you in an abandoned maze of nothing as your fellow companion offers you his biscuit right in the arduous process of your sincere pursuits not to shove the cookie in his mouth and explain to him you’re not as petulant and squeamish to such a degree that you must request cookies from others that do not belong to you in order not to blow up from the miserable rage at every detail gone crooked in your life since the day you started middle school.
After your remarkable silence and inner dejection, you thank whoever was so kind to pay for your drink and vow to avoid all other human beings for the rest of the day. Return home, make several cups of tea until you at last get one that tastes the slightest bit like something drinkable, find your way to the notes you took on the great masters of classic literature. Urge yourself to ignore periodic hunger pangs and temptation to browse through photos of yourself with your best friend before she moved away to Bulgaria.
Stop looking at the chocolate.
Again, stop.
Seriously, you ate pepperoni pizza and ice cream for lunch guiltlessly. A girl your age can’t afford herself the torment of dimpled thighs and a jiggly butt.
You may allow yourself no more than one peach, which is now on your shirt. Your mother gives you a disappointed glance you already know means, “Good job, another shirt ruined.”, and you don’t dare ask why it can’t be dry cleaned because you already know your mother has had troubled relations with the dry cleaning company since they lost her carpet and have failed to find it, leading you to the thorough mental analysis of the stock market (which you try in vain to understand), the unemployment rate and your country’s current economic crisis it will probably never get out of, if and how you will ever get a job and what happens if you fail your studies at university and drop out, whether or not you’ll have to work at a dry cleaning company and lose people’s carpets and get yelled at on the phone and threats to go to court for something completely innocuous that is now the center of your life. You chew your nails and crack your knuckles and subsequently get a lecture from your mother on how much she despises your senseless annoying habits and all the times she has asked you to stop. You do not react because you know she is still angry at the dry cleaning company, and frankly you feel uncomfortable too with the void in your room from that missing blue-and-white patched carpet, specifically since you were the one who left that raspberry stain even when you knew fruit should be eaten in a civilized manner at the kitchen table, not crouching like a dog in your room and getting scoliosis in the meanwhile.
Take a break. Mindfulness does not come easily.
Inhale the scent of fresh cherries and rare GMO-free food you will find these days. Remember to tell your mother you love her for selflessly having the will to push through a stampedo of motionless goats (my wonderful depiction of humankind) during the scorching temperatures of June climate for one paper sack of fruit.
Immense yourself in the nostalgia of electronic conversations with your most beloved acquaintances 10,000 km away from you.
If you have not yet felt the need to release yourself from this excruciating process, repeat until there is nothing left inside of your head to gnaw on and chew the root of to provide you with sufficient migraines until your 50s and crude writing material. SIDE NOTE: if your current mental situation does indeed match the expected results, proceed to step below.
Congratulations. There is little else to comment on, except your expertise on the art of mastering mindfulness. See where it takes you, if at all.

Since you’re already here, don’t just exist. Do something.

Side note: Thank you to all of my dear friends for allowing me to use snippets of their lives for this mindful compilation of teenagers’ experiences. Names have not been included for the sake of privacy.