Breathe consciously and live mindfully

In the stranger, Albert Camus, the Algeria-born French Nobel laureate, narrates the story of man who is condemned to be executed in a few days. As he sits in his cell on death row, the prisoner notices a small patch of sky through the skylight. Suddenly, he seems to feel the deep touch of the present moment, of life itself. He vows to spend his remaining days in mindfulness, in full appreciation of every moment that’s inexorably slipping away towards his sentence. He sticks to his resolve for the remaining days.
    
At last, just three hours are left for his execution when a priest comes into his cell to receive the prisoner’s confession and to administer the last rites. But the man only wants to be alone. He tries one way after another to get the priest to leave and when he finally succeeds, he mutters to himself that the priest lived like a dead man. (“Il vit comme un mort”). He sees that the one trying to save him was less alive than the one about to be hanged.
    
Camus’s story came to Thich Nhat Hahn’s mind when he took a taxi in New York. The noted Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Master saw that the taxi driver was not at all happy. “He was not in the present moment. There was no peace or joy in him, no capacity of being alive while doing the work of driving. And he expressed it in the way he drove,” Nhat Hahn writes in his classic manual on mindfulness, Touching Peace. “Many of us do the same. We rush about, but we are not at one with what we are doing; we are not at peace. Our body is here, but our mind is somewhere else — in the past or the future, possessed by anger, frustration, or dreams. We are not really alive; we are like ghosts. If our beautiful child were to come and offer us a smile, we would miss him completely, and he would miss us. What a pity!”
    
The antidote to this tragic situation lies in getting off your autopilot, to live mindfully. For “our true home is in the present moment,” Nhat Hahn advises. “To live in the present moment is the miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the Green Earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available right now.” He then prescribes a series of exercises for living mindfully, beginning with conscious breathing. This leads to love being directed towards ourselves and to the world.