The title for this post comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, a landmark piece on mindfulness and the art of living well. Why (I ask myself) can the same principles of mindfulness not also be applied to the art of reading well? Mindfulness is a Western adaptation of Zen Buddhist practice. It seeks to wake people up. Life is richer when we are awake not only to the world around us, but also to the world within us—the world of aches and pains, the world of memories and feelings, the world of that incessant commentary chattering inside our heads. As mindful people, we strive to bring all this to consciousness and then, rather than judge ourselves harshly for it, we acknowledge it with a compassionate self-regard. I contend that we can do the same thing, and with the same benefits, when we approach our reading.
It isn’t a stretch to describe reading as a meditative practice. As we pass our eyes along each line of text, we struggle to maintain focus. We may be tired or worried and find it difficult to let ourselves be drawn into the text. The text itself may be dense and confusing, or the views expressed may trouble us. The writer’s tone may be quarrelsome or the writer’s point of view may be so far from our own that we spend as much time conducting a mental debate with the writer as we spend reading the words before our eyes. We may have forgotten what went before in the development of a complex argument. If we’re reading a work of fiction, we may find ourselves reminded by a character of people in our own lives. We may fantasize about scenarios or even project ourselves into the plot. In reading, the opportunities to stray from the text are limitless.
Full catastrophe reading engages us at different stages in the process of reading.
The text in front of our face
At its most immediate, mindful reading engages us with this text in front of our face. Occasionally, as we read this text in front of our face, each one of us catches the mind drifting from the text, making a mental note of that fact (“Oh damn, there I go again”), and snapping our attention back to this text in front of our face. Our natural inclination is to self-criticism; we chastise ourselves for our lack of focus.
Mindful reading begins with compassionate self-regard. Instead of self-criticism, we acknowledge our wandering mind (our monkey mind) as a neutral fact. We remember that all minds are the same. Even the most disciplined and experienced readers must cope with the monkey mind. We smile at ourselves. And then we do something important: we make a note of where our mind has wandered. This information may prove useful later on.
Stocking our shelves
Yes, we must be mindful of the text in front of our face, but we must be mindful of the texts we choose for our shelves even before we put them in front of our face. How we stock our shelves is as important as how we read our texts. If we stock our shelves according to someone else’s list, then we aren’t acting mindfully; we are surrendering to someone else’s view of what counts as a worthy text. We’re all aware of the BBC’s 100 top novels of all time, and the 1000 books we need to read before we die, and Time’s recent contribution to the list mania. While these lists are useful, a mindful reader will approach them with caution, aware that they reflect specific world views and often homogeneous tastes.
Full catastrophe reading demands that the reader throw disparate texts into collision with one another. It demands reading across genres, across cultures, across styles and forms. It demands reading both fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, drama and scripture. A mindful reader acknowledges the fear of embracing the new, the strange, the unfamiliar, but embraces it all the same. There are benefits to throwing disparate texts into collision. This act of mindful selection mirrors the creative process which, itself, depends upon the collision of disparate ideas. How can we learn anything new, how can we leverage fresh insights, how can we grow, if we limit our reading to the familiar?
From shelves to experience
It is one thing to set disparate books in collision with one another; it is quite another thing to set those disparate books in collision with our personal experience. Imagine the mind map of a person who has read one hundred books. As a mindful reader, she has thrown those books into collision with one another. We could represent this like a road map where the towns represent books and the roads connecting those towns represent the unexpected conversations that pass between those books. If a person has read only in one genre (e.g. they are obsessed with space opera science fiction), all the towns will appear close together on the map and the connecting roads will be easy to travel. But if the person has selected one hundred disparate books, they will appear scattered far and wide, and the roads connecting them will meander past all kinds of scenery.
Now imagine that the mindful reader throws those far flung books into collision with her personal experience—love, loss, work, family, children, illness, aging, marriage, conflict. How much more intricate such a mind map will appear. And, since books are experiences in their own right, how much richer such a reader’s life will be.
Catastrophic reflection
While it may not be appropriate to speak about the purpose of mindful reading (since the purpose is simply to be awake), it may nevertheless be helpful to acknowledge the consequences of mindful reading. I have already noted the compassionate self-regard of full catastrophe reading, but it inevitably follows from such a practice that our compassion becomes other-regarding too. We pause to reflect on these disparate things we have read. What was strange becomes human. We open ourselves up to difference. We feel the experience of others.
When I wrote of the monkey mind, I advised readers to make a note of where the mind has wandered, as this might prove useful. We chastised ourselves for losing focus, but that may have been unwarranted. In fact, the drift to speculation and daydreams may hold in it the seeds of a radical identification, a compassion for the other:
• We pray at midday in a bombed-out mosque in Baghdad.
• We steal a satellite signal for our neighbours in Albania.
• We sneak from Tunis to Spain under cover of night.
• We fight alongside rebels at the mouth of a silver mine in South America.
• We narrowly escape the death squads after Pinochet’s coup.
• We live with the Iroquois as they try to understand these strange Puritans who have settled nearby.
• We ride a raft down the Mississippi with an escaped slave.
• We lash out against white missionaries who try to tell us how to live our lives.
• We resist a totalitarian regime which limits our speech and monitors our thoughts.
Our minds reach out in compassion to the men and women who write such things. In turn, we may be drawn to commit another act of full catastrophe reading—the act of writing for ourselves. Call it full catastrophe writing. We take all we’ve lived and all we’ve read and throw these experiences into collision with one another, then we note the results, giving voice to a radical compassion.