Up: [[Savour]] Created: 2023-04-15 Updated: 2026-01-18 > [!Orbit] Thich Nhat Hahn in *How to Walk* > Mindfulness is the practice of deeply touching every moment of daily life. (p.19) > [!Orbit] Christina Feldman Willem Kuyken in *Mindfulness* > (Mindfulness requires) deploying attention like a flashlight beam, *choosing* where to shine the light and what to leave in darkness. (p.14) > [!Orbit] Thich Nhat Hahn > The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. > [!Orbit] Thich Nhat Hahn > Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. > [!Orbit] Thich Nhat Hahn > We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment, the only moment there is for us to be alive. > [!Orbit] Jon Kabat-Zinn > Mindfulness is a way of befriending ourselves and our experience. > [!Orbit] Me! > We can consciously control the beam of our attention, altering its width and brightness. > Mindfulness is the vehicle that allows intention to become focus. > [!Orbit] [[Abigail Thomas]] in a Substack post > I figure I have a choice. I can worry myself into the ground. That’s one. Or I can think of my failing memory as an achievement. I am finally living in the moment. > [!Orbit] Marion Milner in *A Life of One’s Own* > Experiencing the present with the whole of my body instead of with the pinpoint of my intellect led to all sorts of new knowledge and new [[contentment]]. I began to guess what it might mean to live from the heart instead of the head, and I began to feel movements of the heart which told me more surely what I wanted than any making of lists. (p. 138) > [!Orbit] Muriel Rukeyser in *Willard Gibbs: The whole is simpler than its parts* > Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. > [!Orbit] Virginia Woolf in *Moments of Being* > A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day, the proportion of non-being is much larger. > [!Orbit] Virginia Woolf in *Moments of Being* > The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past, but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it is pressed so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of house moving — causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. > [!Orbit] Duane Toops > Everything seemingly static is made of events and unfoldings. Moments upon moments within moments that make up the life of a thing. Moments of tensiion, and wonder, and excitement, and interest. Moments of sorrow, and joy, and melancholy. Art is what happens when you notice one. When you look at it closely. When you put a frame around it. When you give it the space and time to speak. > [!Orbit] Alan Watts > Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.