A Guide For Creating More Mindful Moments

Stop and smell the flowers. You’ve probably heard this popular adage generally offered alongside advice, such as focus on the journey, not the destination and enjoy the process. While stop and smell slightly helps clarify the meaning of the two aphorisms in the prior sentence, what does it actually mean, and can we extend it further? Throughout this exploration, I’ll lean on the hypothetical act of seeing a flower on a walk to draw out a few practical applications for us all. Finally, I’ll bring them into the realm of mindfulness.

Stop and Smell | What Does It Mean?

In the chain of events, stopping seems like it comes before smelling. We’ll dig deeper into this proposition shortly, but let’s assume stopping precedes smelling for now. Thus, after incorporating the chronological component, let’s rewrite the phrase as stop then smell the flowers. Now, we can separately investigate stopping and smelling.

To Stop

Stop has become a term with many meanings - some of which I know, and certainly more I don’t. A potential meaning that comes to mind is the cessation of activity and motion. In the context of your walk, this could mean your heart stops - bad - or the movement of all atoms stop - really bad. Clearly, a sensible line can be drawn with Hippocrates’ pen. That is, we should do no harm to others or ourselves.

(Aside: I’m all for the sight of a flower taking my breath away as long as I get it back 😮‍💨)

I think the most straightforward definition of stop, in this context, is to stop your feet from moving. After you’ve seen the flower, plant your feet in the ground and remain still.

To Smell

When you’re sitting in a movie theater, your friends won’t ask if you see the screen since they implicitly assume it. Likewise, your friends won’t ask if you can hear sounds at a concert. Usually, they’ll ask if you still can hear after the concert because it was too loud (lol).

However, people tend to forget you have a sense of smell, unlike sight and sound. Thus, It’s one of the few hidden, albeit real, modes of perception you possess. Personally, I’m a tremendous fan of the sense of smell. Unfortunately, people tend to only point out delightful or awful scents, though I’ve heard the latter favored in most conversations. Don’t forget: your sense of smell constantly receives and processes inputs! Like all your senses, known and unknown, you cannot modulate your sense of smell as you please.

Let’s return to the flower in front of us. Depending on the flower’s height, you may need to bend down or stand on your tippy toes. Time to smell it. If it helps, feel free to close your eyes. What pops into your mind— is it a description of the scent? Perhaps, it’s a feeling or a memory from long ago?

Regardless, you have stopped and smelled the flowers. While you are free to continue your walk, I firmly believe there’s more to the story here.

Beyond Stop and Smell

Any further extensions seem likely to come from greater sensorial engagement. However, if you’re attentive, you may notice that we have already used more than our sense of smell during the walk.

Before we stopped to smell the flower, we saw it. Our sight guided us to this object for reasons beyond our comprehension. Whether its combination of colors caught your attention or the butterfly floating nearby drew you towards it, your sight played a role in your coming to this particular organism.

To a lesser degree, your sense of touch also helped because it confirmed that you stopped moving your feet. Following the standard of doing no harm to others or yourself, I advocate against actually touching the flower or eating it. Please don’t underestimate allergies or your potential to accidentally disrupt the unique ecosystem on its delicate surface.

Now, let’s return to stop then smell the flowers. Our recent discourse demonstrates that the phrase fails to capture the importance of sight and touch. You don’t glimpse the flowers in a vacuum. Instead, they appear before you in the context of an area that supports their dynamic growth, like a garden. Surely, we should rewrite the phrase as see the flowers, feel that you’ve stopped and then smell them…right?

Wrong! I want to make the aphorism easy enough to understand and place in the front pocket, next to your heart 😊 I believe we can further simplify the phrase to stop and experience the flowers.

Stop and Experience | Wow Thru How

After adding stop and experience to your mindful reminders, feel free to take the exercise as far as you’d like! Stop and experience the flock of birds soaring over your head. Stop and experience the wind gently caressing your distinct hair. With all the senses at your fingertips, only you define the boundaries of your experience.

Here’s the extent to which I’ve ventured. I enjoy posing an inquiry that begins with wow!, continues with a series of question words and concludes with how?!

Allow me to demonstrate — let’s say I see the flower below during my walk.

Accompanying the symphony of stimuli that drew me to the showy honey-myrtle, a chorus of enraptured wow’s echoes through my mind. My awareness noticed something, and it wants to investigate. What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it look like this? Who placed it here? Each question aims to help me make sense of what I see. Each produces a semblance of an answer in the form of a thought.

I, an abecedarian anthophile, might initially say, “It’s a flower.” Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I might recall some ideas from my biology classes to better appreciate the intricate ecosystem required to sustain such a graceful creature. However, all that is just a jumble of words in my mind. The rich words I think I’m using to describe something so unbelievable suddenly seem impoverished, hollow of any substance.

We have stumbled on quite the conundrum, which deserves some addressing. Language is functional insofar as it allows us to communicate, explain what we know and share our highs and lows. Importantly, these symbols represent reality, but they are not reality. Language becomes beautiful when it describes reality accurately and / or inspires independent investigation. Though it’s meaningful yet hollow, language is the best tool we have to increase our cumulative understanding.

(Heck, I know I’m using language to convey my thoughts regarding a topic to you. Only time will tell if I’ve done that successfully.)

You didn’t invent the English language. It was given to you as a result of a social enterprise, [going] on for thousands of years...[When] you consult your mind, you are consulting the entire organization of the universe as it is immediately, more immediately reflected in the structure of your nervous system and everything that your nervous system is doing.
~ Alan Watts, World as Play Part 4

Interestingly, I know exactly what the flower is as soon as I see it. As soon as I label it with words, I begin to separate myself from it. Karl Kraus, an Austrian aphorist and poet, contemplated the gaze’s connection with language when he said, “The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it looks back.” The longer I experience something, the greater the chasm between it and my understanding. The chasm between the word flower and the flower, in reality, seems terrifying if we assume words equal reality. However, suppose we adjust the perspective to words represent reality. In that case, the chasm transforms into the wellspring of wonder— the source of all wow’s!

In a conversation with Tim Ferriss, Sam Harris - my intellectual inspiration 🤠 - discusses the German literary critic Walter Benjamin’s commentary on Kraus’ previous quote:

[Benjamin] stumbled upon this mystery in Marseille after smoking hashish for the first time. He distilled it in the phrase, “How things withstand the gaze.” And all things really do withstand the gaze. We confront the mystery of being in every moment, but we don’t notice it because this mystery is tiled over with concepts. Now, meditation isn’t about understanding things conceptually. It’s the ability to experience things more clearly prior to concepts.
~ Sam Harris, The Tim Ferriss Show (#342)

I believe the ability to express unconditional love sets its roots in this recognition. Rest and relax in that you know everything but don’t understand everything — you can’t understand everything. To experience and accept something anew as if for the first time before any conceptual conditioning is to love it unconditionally. Refrain from reflexively labeling things without a purpose. Nevertheless, unconditional love is an idea so important that I’ll save it for a future discussion.

Finally, if you’re up for the challenge, consider turning your awareness upon itself. From zero distance, both a flower basking in the sunlight and your breath are contents of your consciousness, just objects of your awareness. As a matter of experience, there’s no material difference between them. Likewise, my perception of myself is another object of my awareness. The true fruit of the stop and experience exercise entails dissolving the boundary between formal and informal mindfulness practices.

If you diligently and patiently hold your gaze, the concepts wrapped around you slowly fade away like a chimera. Soon, from stopping your feet, you’ll stop identifying with discursive thought. You can calmly observe the voice saying “I am angry” and compassionately describe your state as “I am aware that I feel anger.” Soon, from experiencing the flower as a part of the world, you’ll experience yourself as the world. Then, you no longer need to sit still in a quiet room to be mindful. In fact, the world itself becomes the tutor that provides every resource for consistent practice. All you’re left with is an abundance of how’s. How do I see?! How do I know?! How can this be?!

Whether it’s your name, mood or accolades, using words to define and, thereby, confine your being seems, dare I say, offensive. Words can describe me, the ineffable product of a 13.8 billion-year cosmological dance, but they are not who I am. Can you stop and experience that?

first time reading? please check out the sailing manual for helpful guidance!