“Montaigne practiced a form of what we today call mindfulness through his essay writing. His quest in writing was to find out how to be ‘fully human” (sic) he tried to recognize when his thoughts went to ‘extraneous incidents.” He would then work to bring this thinking back to the here and now and the ‘sweetness’ of the moment. He found mindfulness key to ‘living well.’” (author’s bold) 1.
Mindfulness is a modern industry and consequently my natural inclination it to eschew the word and be weary of what it represents. That’s just the way I’m built. My tendency is to avoid the popular and the common, just as I avoid dogma and group think. Montaigne, among others, has taught me to be skeptical of all solutions, especially the easy ones, and accept that life is such that off-the-shelf solutions and systematic philosophies will forever fall short of critical thinking and one’s capacity for reason. Consequently, where others might use the word mindfulness I prefer attention, and as I wrote in the last post when elevated to the highest degree and with the most tender care attention can be an edifying and even spiritual practice.
“It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to rightfully enjoy our being. We search for other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.”
This quote gets a lot of circulation. It is quintessential Montaigne and sums up the human condition without obfuscating or being pretentious. To be at peace with yourself is an absolute perfection, yet we irrationally turn outward in our efforts to generate or find this state of being. We metaphorically mount stilts to gain a better vision, yet forget that we are nonetheless still standing our our own legs. We might be exalted and sit on a high throne, but the reality is we’re nonetheless sitting on our own backside, just like everyone else.
To understand the motivation behind Montaigne’s practice of mindful consider the first sentence quoted above: “…to know how to rightfully enjoy our being.” The vehicle by which he attempted to plumb his being was his writing. There, word by word, over years of growth and reflection, like an archeologist he excavated self-awareness. It was in his writing where he attempted to answer the Delphic command: gnothi seauton, “know thyself.”
You don’t read Montaigne to get answers; although you will find suggestions and prompts. You read Montaigne to study how one individual attempted to find his own answers. He is starkly void of doctrine. Where others, philosophers, theologians, gurus, and life coaches proclaim what to do and how to do it, Montaigne only shows us how he did it, how he moved in the world, thereby suggesting a direction we may wish to consider; he provides suggestions, not answers. There are no magical or easy solutions. We must follow his lead and simply do the work ourselves.
Specific to our topic, Montaigne’s attention turned inward, and his book became the record of that journey. “Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.” (III.5) His inner journey is most evident in the Essays, but that was not the only outlet he explored as he inched his way toward wisdom. Travel too played a significant role, which I will pick up in the next post.
Before I close, I would be remiss if I didn’t openly challenge myself. In light of Montaigne’s lessons: by what method do I strive to rightfully know my own being? There is no single answer to this question, in true Montaignian fashion. Rather, every method by which I pursue an elevated existence is a node in a web of nodes, all connected and interlaced.2. In the face of such complexity, there is, however, a simple (yet difficult) method by which to navigate: pay attention. A few ways by which I practice this discipline are: keeping a journal, making photographs, traveling; attempting to be a good listener, mindfully measuring my social connections, and practicing acceptance.
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- Erik M. Gregory Ph.D, Montaigne’s 7 Musings on a Life Well- Lived, Reflections and advice from the 1500s, “Psychology Today”, May 5, 2018
- Obviously, Indra’s net comes to mind.
...the house I live in... 
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