Tonight is Halloween, the night we play with the fear of death. Michel de Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French philosopher, thought about it at length. His «Essays» include a chapter titled «That to philosophize is to learn to die», inspired by Cicero and the ancients: according to him, getting used to that thought takes away some of death’s strangeness.
But in his last essays Montaigne changes tone. He writes, in essence, that if we do not know how to die we need not worry: nature will see to it, at the right moment. And he adds that our great masterpiece is to live appropriately, that is, to give each thing its time and to enjoy our being with loyalty. It is an invitation to presence.
And what does science say about being present? In 2010 Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, of Harvard, published in Science the study «A wandering mind is an unhappy mind». Using an iPhone app they asked 2,250 adults at random moments, collecting about 250,000 responses. Result: the mind wandered 46.9% of the time, and when it wandered people reported being less happy on average. Where the mind was explained about 10.8% of the variation in happiness, while the activity being done explained about 4.6%.
A note of caution: these are participants’ own reports, from a sample using an app; the time-lag analyses suggest that wandering comes before unhappiness, but they do not prove a certain cause, and the study does not say that wandering is always harmful (it can also help with planning or creating). It does not, of course, speak of Montaigne: the pairing is ours.
A suggestion of our own, not the study’s: tonight, while you enjoy pumpkins and costumes, give five minutes to one thing only, without thinking of anything else. A warm cup, a person, a breath. When the mind runs off, bring it back gently.
And you, what do you do when you want to be truly here and now? Tell us in the comments: your trick may help someone else.
Sources
- Killingsworth M.A., Gilbert D.T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932, DOI 10.1126/science.1192439.
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays: «That to philosophize is to learn to die» (book I) and the last essays of book III. The book III passages are given in sense, from current translations: please check the text in the edition you prefer.
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