As this morning’s quote reminds us, in meditation we practice giving bare attention to the breath, just noticing, without adding anything. We try to extend this to life, slowing down the continual pre-judgments or commentary in our heads. However, it is not easy just to let things be, without the immediate adding of a word or evaluation. The mind quickly adds words, positive ones like, “This is good, I like it here”, or more likely spontaneous negative ones, such as ” This is not for me, This is boring” or “She always says the same things”. Fixed ideas mean that we lose curiosity about what is unfolding each day. So our practice includes getting the balance between knowing and not-knowing, trying to know fully what is actually happening and losing some of our stories about people or about how our life is going.
[In the beginning,] … the photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer — a scribe, not a poet. But as people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same things, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Mindfulbalance 