Contemplative practices are strategies used to connect your studies to your personal experiences, and to be honest, I didn’t feel like I had a lot to learn from them. I try to practice mindfulness, but it doesn’t drastically or viscerally impact the way I see the world. In class, when Professor Litfin was explaining why she uses contemplative practices in regard to our material, I wasn’t expecting to be floored by it. And so far, I haven’t been. But I think that’s the point.
Learning by connecting material to your own personal experiences isn’t rapturous, and it isn’t supposed to be in order for it to be helpful. It’s more a more insidious form of learning. In class, when we connected interdependence and living systems to our breakfast, I had had eaten fig newmans. My morning routine usually consists of washing my face, moisturizing, getting dressed, grabbing breakfast, and leaving. None of that seems too out of the ordinary, but reflecting on my fig newmans complicated things.
Where did your breakfast come from? Well, probably a fig tree. Who and what was involved in producing it? Transportation, labor, machinery, probably. Maybe even Paul Newman himself.
I spent more time contemplating my fig newmans in class than I did when I ate them running out the door, and I think this is important. Contemplative exercises haven’t failed me, or even you, if we don’t have psychedelic epiphanies about reading material or the food on our plates.
Contemplative exercises have served their purpose not when they change your worldview. They’ve served their purpose when they make you contemplate, even if it’s about something as ordinary as how you spent more time washing your face than eating your food, or what Paul Newman would think about how little time you relegated to enjoying his fig snacks in the morning.
Response 2: Kailey, I think you have shed light on a very pertinent thought for those of us in this course. Not every contemplative practice is going to change our worlds or assist us in developing new perspectives, however, they do help us in creating a more attentive mind to the nuances of our world. Maybe the goal was never to change our minds or make us come up with new ideas, but rather to make stronger connections between ideas we never knew could connect. While the contemplative practice about our breakfast was interesting, I didn’t think that it had much of an impact on me in a global perspective. Of course, it makes me think more closely about what I put in my mouth, but I think that is more of a self-reflection habit. Instead, I think it has been the contemplative practices that my study group and I have carried out regarding race and food, trade liberalization and poor countries, and localism, which have immensely changed my view on the world. Not every contemplative practice needs that effect to be purposeful, but I think those are the reflections which have been the most fruitful in allowing me to make important connections about the world around me.