The Mindful Revolutionary
How David Foster Wallace beat the West to the present moment
by Rose Bretécher
In 2015, mindfulness continues to blaze through Western consciousness. Its incendiary rise to popularity over the past half-decade has been fuelled by a million TED Talks, think pieces, corporate conferences and high-profile endorsements from the likes of Arianna Huffington and Emma Watson. Now, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Google and the Bank of England have all invested in mindfulness training, and the US Marine Corps use the practice to treat their soldiers for post-traumatic stress. This is, as Time magazine famously declared in 2014, The Mindful Revolution.
But years before the media hype began, David Foster Wallace was championing a little mindful revolution of his own. In his beautiful This Is Water commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, Wallace described a way of training your mind to be present in each moment — to not get lost in cacophonous, self-centered thoughts. The key to thinking, he said, is “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to,” noticing what’s “hidden in plain sight all around us.”
“Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s thought to”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s so strikingly like the mindfulness definitions that have recently peeked at us from myriad newsstands, Facebook feeds, and earnest chat show segments. “Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s thought to” says Jon Kabat-Zinn, who’s been extolling the benefits of the practice since the 1970s, and who recently appeared on Oprah.
So the ideas in This Is Water were not new or original. Wallace didn’t use the term “mindfulness”, but he was certainly interested in Buddhism and clearly understood the Millennia-old origins of his philosophies. Nor do his recommendations tally exactly with those of today’s practitioners. What is remarkable is the immense value he placed on mindfulness’ central goal: awareness, something which big business and media wouldn’t come to value until many years later. “In the day today trenches of adult life,” Wallace said, “the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline”, articulating an urgent passion for mindful thinking before the mainstream even knew what it was. He was at the party, necking a cool glass of punch, while we were still stuck in traffic.
Like mindfulness advocates before and after him, Wallace spoke of the human default to “interpret everything through the lens of self” — to worship the self, to ruminate about the self, to be “a slave to your head”. And of how painfully difficult it is to resist that default: “It’s hard, it takes will and effort, and if you’re like me, some days you won’t be able to do it.” Wallace was careful to stress to those young Kenyon graduates how easy it is to lose against our own tyrant mind: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head,” he said. “They shoot the terrible master.”
Here the speech is eerily prophetic and incredibly moving, because ultimately Wallace could not resist his default — his terrible master won. But in the corporatised, PowerPoint-presented, celebrity-endorsed furore of modern mindfulness, the power and serenity of This Is Water endures.
Rose Bretécher — writer and author
