Contemplative Learning and Inquiry across Disciplines

3 Kindred Spirits in Teaching Contemplative Practice: Distraction, Solitude, and Simplicity

3 Kindred Spirits in Teaching Contemplative Practice Distraction, Solitude, and Simplicity Mara Adelman We are born to interruption—it is attention we must cultivate. —Paraphrase of Jackson, Distracted, 2008, p. 79 Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depends on how you handle it. —Gallagher, 2009, p. 11 Topics essential to understanding contemplation are like kindred spirits that can move us beyond preaching to the choir. Secular, everyday issues that are highly relevant to the teaching of contemplative practices can broaden its appeal. Given the frenetic pace of our students’ lives, examining and critiquing the status quo may offer insights, even inspiration, to furthering their mindfulness practice. This chapter outlines how the topics of distraction, solitude, and voluntary simplicity (herein referred to as “simplicity”) and related subtopics can complement our understanding and experience of contemplative practice. This chapter also highlights a course entitled “Restorative Solitude” (Adelman, 2009) and a faculty workshop entitled “The Elephant in our Living Room: Distraction in Students Personal and Academic Lives” (Adelman, 2010). In both of these programs, contemplative practices, including meditative and reflective practices, were used throughout, often with insightful outcomes. 51 52 Mara Adelman Given the onslaught of “attention capitalism” where attention is up for sale (for example, pop-ups, hyperlinks, streaming advertising), it is critical that we understand contemplative practices as an antidote to the notion that our capacity to focus is now a valued commodity, reframed as the “attention economy” a “currency” or “asset” with “value” (Davenport & Beck, 2001). Contemplative practices are embedded within the larger social context, and the commoditization of attention demands scrutiny. Themes of distraction, solitude and simplicity provide starting points for examining this cultural backdrop. Rationale It is not uncommon to hear faculty bemoan students’ hectic lives and their attachment to screens like babies to mammary glands—and then within minutes speak of the busyness of their own lives. Herein the term “screens” will be used to describe all technological devices, including computers, portables, phones, television, and so on, including techno-usage such as phoning, emailing , texting, and Internet searching. Academic climates, like most institutional climates, exalt the busy life. We reward it. Since we assume that we live in a culture of busyness, hyper-schedules, and tech-saturated, time-compressed encounters, we often do not speak about the elephant in the living room. These taken-for-granted assumptions about life fuel tacit understandings of the unsustainable. In part, this chapter argues that we need to name the elephant, critique it, unpack it, and engage our students in critical reflection. The cultural wash of busyness and techno-saturation is so pervasive that it remains unchecked and unexamined. Like Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond, when we examine these kindred spirits, we too move to the outskirts of town to reflect and ponder. Dialectical Perspective The dialectical perspective is grounded in the notion that we need to examine contrary perspectives that appear as opposites but, in fact, vacillate in nature. Like a tightrope, these “oppositions” are held in tension and only momentarily resolved. In our everyday lives, we often move in tension between various opposing states of being. For example, couples often negotiate the dialectic of dependence and independence, such as the amount of time spent together or apart. 53 Kindred Spirits in Teaching Contemplative Practice Contradictions and dialectical tensions are central features of a dialectical analysis. . . . Motion, activity, and change are thus fundamental properties of social life in a dialectical perspective, and the present state of any relationship is considered an incessant achievement. (Rawlins, 1992, p. 7) The ways in which our reality is constructed are highly relevant to embedding contemplative practices into our intellectual and popular climate. A major perspective in explaining how we perceive reality is the concept of the “social construction of reality” that privileges communication (including mass media) as the major channel for creating shared meaning. However, Braman (2007) argues for a “contemplative construction of reality”—including the importance of silence, solitude, and contemplative practices by which a person comes to know the world. This contemplative construction of reality happens “within the individual and within the broader natural environment that includes but goes beyond the human . . .” (p. 284). Contemplative practice shapes our communicative competence: “Silence brings us to our selves, to possibilities of knowledge, to awareness of what is around us, and...