THE KICKER:MY FATHER LOVES to recall how I was once recruited to help him assemble a set of bookshelves in my brother's room many years ago, and how I held a piece of wood in the correct position with one hand and kept the other hand plunged into my trouser pocket, the better to indicate how unhappy I was with the whole thing.
It was at the very crest of my teenage wave of sullenness and, reading the signs, Dad asked me whether I was enjoying myself. "Frankly, it bores the hell out of me," I replied, and when he laughed at my response, it only made me angrier.
As the story above illustrates, history has positioned me at the opposite end of the spectrum of mindfulness. To date, I've been every "i" word under the sun: by impatiently ripping apart the packaging in which objects have arrived, I have broken them. By impetuously throwing away receipts for things I have not tried on, I have rendered them worthless, and by impulsively trying to assemble the chair before reading the instructions, I have made a pig's ear of it forever. My modus operandi has been to bin the excess screws and use a hammer to try knocking things into better shape. This process has always failed, and having ambushed my own peace of mind, I have then spent my life perched uncomfortably on top of wobbling chairs, worrying that they are about to collapse, but never taking the time to take them apart and re-assemble them.
No more. Recently, I have been teaching myself the Buddhist art of mindfulness; of being fully present in the moment, no matter how mundane or irritating that moment might be - sitting in taxis that crawl through gridlocked traffic, holding on the phone for the man in Bangalore, or even the art of motorcycle maintenance, should it occur. Now, I enjoy the journey, smell roses, and savour every stage on the way rather than focusing on the tiny dot on the horizon, the tiny moving target that marks the conclusion of whatever dull act I am forced to perform. With this, I am making some progress, and I decided to put my mindfulness to the test last weekend, fixing the audio problems in my living room.
When I moved into my new place, my landlord left me a surround-sound speaker set which only worked in conjunction with the DVD player. The speaker set commanded a fair amount of living-room real estate and I decided that it would need to work a little harder. I would buy an amp and hook up the television, DVD player and digital box so that the speaker would work for all of them. Afterwards, I would buy a small transmitter for broadcasting music from my computer's hard drive wirelessly to the speakers. In this way, the experience of watching television and movies, or listening to music in my living room, would be colossally enjoyable - but that was the destination. The experience of mindfully assembling all these components, the journey, would also be hugely enjoyable, in and of itself.
Saturday dawned bright and Marvin in Richer Sounds could not have been more helpful. Not only did he sell me the right amp but he threw in some free cabling, and suggested I call him if I ran into problems. I hauled the amp out of the shop and hailed a cab with my foot. Naturally, I ran into some problems, and after three hours of work I called Marvin. He offered to call around at seven and in the meantime I bought the computer gizmo so that once he came, everything could be tested and found to work perfectly.
Marvin came and went, and when he left the amp was working for the DVD player and television, and, so far, the seven-hour journey had been reasonably enjoyable. I set about installing the transmitter, and only abandoned it at 9pm to take a break and meet a friend for a pint. I wouldn't say I was stressed by my 10-hour Saturday shift on my hands and knees underneath a 24-inch television set trying to fit minuscule wires into tiny holes and clasp them shut while the guy from Richer Sounds talked about how much he loved Chelsea Football Club, but neither had it been quite as mindful as I would have hoped.
Don't try to switch a wireless transmitter to "client mode" and try to get it to communicate with your router on a Sunday morning, with a headache, having wasted a Saturday on the very same process. Do not plug and unplug modems, cable and re-cable boxes, crawl around on all fours looking for inputs, start and re-start routers, attempt to find help on the web only to learn that you have disrupted your internet connection. Do not do that. I cannot stress that enough.
In my continuing quest for mindfulness, I am feeling very much like Samuel L Jackson did in Pulp Fiction playing Jules, the hit man trying to stay on the straight and narrow, yet training a revolver on a man's head. He spake thus: "Now I'm thinkin': you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr 9mm here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could be you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that sh*t ain't the truth. The truth is, you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd."
Me too.