The Friend Who Taught Me About Living
Many years ago, my close friend and business partner Jordan was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma. We had been meeting regularly every Tuesday for lunch to discuss business, but after his diagnosis, our conversations shifted dramatically. Business matters became secondary as we found ourselves talking more and more about life and death.
As the months passed, and it became clear the end was approaching, I found myself curious about something I'd never experienced. During one of our lunches, I asked him directly: "Jordan, what does it feel like to know that you're dying?"
His response changed my entire perspective. He smiled and said, "I don't know—you tell me."
I was confused. "What do you mean?"
"You're dying too," he said gently. "I just have a better guess about when. There's a chance you could be in a car accident on your way home from lunch today and die before I do. Most likely, I'll die first, but there's no guarantee. So what does it feel like to know that you might die before me?"
In that moment, I didn’t discover that we’re all dying. I already knew that. What I discovered was something far more unsettling: that death doesn’t wait politely in the distance. It can step in at any moment, unannounced, for any of us.
This conversation became the foundation for everything I want to share about living mindfully. Because mindfulness isn't really about meditation techniques or breathing exercises—it's about waking up to the reality that this moment, right now, is your life. Not a preparation for life, not a dress rehearsal, but the actual experience of being alive.
The Mental Exercise That Changes Everything
Here's a powerful way to understand what I'm talking about. Right now, as you're reading this, you have some level of contentment or dissatisfaction with your current situation. Maybe work is stressful, maybe money is tight, maybe a relationship is difficult. There are probably several things you'd change if you could.
Now I want you to imagine that sometime today, you get a phone call that changes everything for the worse. Maybe it's news that a family member has been in an accident. Maybe it's a diagnosis of a serious illness. Maybe it's the loss of your job. Choose whatever scenario would be genuinely devastating for you.
Imagine you're now living in that new, much more difficult reality. From that place, look back at where you are right now, in this moment, reading these words. Wouldn't you give anything to have your current "problems" instead of those much bigger ones?
From the perspective of that imagined crisis, your current situation—with all its imperfections—would look like paradise. You'd think, "If I could just go back to worrying about my current boss, dealing with my current financial stress, managing my current relationship challenges, life would be so good."
But that's exactly where you are right now. The only thing that makes your current situation seem inadequate is that you're comparing it to an imaginary better situation instead of recognizing the countless ways it's already better than it could be.
The question is: which perspective will you choose?
Everything You Need Is Here
Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön has said, "The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves." Life already contains unavoidable challenges—what the Buddha called the first arrow of suffering. But we often shoot ourselves with a second arrow by resisting, resenting, or creating stories about the first arrow.
Living mindfully means recognizing that everything you need to respond to life skillfully is available right here, right now. Not everything you might want, but everything you actually need. This isn't positive thinking or denial—it's a recognition that whatever resources of wisdom, strength, creativity, or love you're going to draw on in a crisis are the same resources that are available to you in this moment.
Think about it: if that devastating phone call came today, what would you do? You'd find strength you didn't know you had. You'd prioritize what really matters. You'd reach out for support. You'd tap into reserves of courage and compassion. You'd become present in a way that maybe you haven't been present in months or years.
All of those capacities—strength, clarity about priorities, connection, courage, compassion, presence—they're not created by crisis. They're revealed by it. Which means they're here now, available to you in this ordinary moment, if you can learn to access them without waiting for an emergency.
Death as Teacher
In many wisdom traditions, contemplating mortality isn't morbid—it's clarifying. Not because death is “good”, but because remembering our limited time helps us see what actually matters.
If you knew you had one year to live, would you spend it worrying about what people think of your social media posts? Would you hold grudges? Would you postpone having important conversations? Would you stay in work that drains your soul just for a slightly bigger paycheck?
Of course not. You'd focus on what's essential: relationships, experiences, contribution, love, growth, and presence. The question is: why wait?
This doesn't mean quitting your job tomorrow or dramatically restructuring your entire life. It means bringing the clarity that comes from remembering mortality into your daily choices. It means asking, "How would I live this day, this conversation, this decision if I remembered that my time is limited?"
As the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, "It is not death that a man should fear, but never beginning to live."
The Ordinary Miracle of Now
One of the most powerful aspects of mindful living is recognizing that the present moment—this moment, however ordinary it seems—contains everything. The past exists only as memory arising now. The future exists only as imagination or planning arising now. This moment is literally all you have, and it's also all you need.
This can sound like spiritual bypassing—using spiritual concepts to avoid dealing with practical realities. That's not what I'm suggesting. You still need to plan for the future, learn from the past, and work to improve difficult situations. But you do all of that from here, now, in the only moment where action is actually possible.
Mindful living means being fully present for your life as it’s actually happening, rather than engaging in mental commentary about it. It’s the difference between eating a meal and thinking about eating a meal, between listening to someone speak and preparing what you’ll say next, and between walking somewhere and mentally already being at your destination.
The 11 Tools for Mindful Living
Over the years of study and practice, I've identified eleven practical approaches to cultivating mindfulness in daily life. These aren't rules to follow—they're tools to experiment with, adapt to your circumstances, and use if/when they're helpful.
1. Meditation: This is where formal mindfulness practice usually begins. Even five to ten minutes of sitting quietly, following your breath, and noticing when your mind wanders can begin to transform your relationship to your thoughts and emotions. You don't need perfect concentration—you just need to practice the simple cycle of noticing when you're distracted and gently returning attention to your chosen focus.
2. Being Present: This is mindfulness off the meditation cushion. It's giving your full attention to whatever you're doing, whether that's washing dishes, listening to a friend, or walking to your car. Most of us have had the experience of someone talking to us while we're only half-listening, thinking about something else. Being present is the opposite of that—it's being fully here for whatever is happening.
3. Watching for Distractions: We live in an age of unprecedented distraction. Smartphones, social media, streaming services, news cycles—there's always something trying to pull your attention away from present-moment experience. Mindful living means becoming aware of your relationship to these distractions. Not eliminating them necessarily, but choosing more consciously when to engage with them and when to remain present.
4. Letting Go of Expectations: This might be the most challenging and most liberating practice. We all have expectations about how our day should go, how people should behave, and how things should work out. When reality doesn't match our expectations, we suffer. Learning to hold expectations lightly—to prefer certain outcomes without demanding them—is a key to greater inner peace.
5. Accepting What Is: This doesn't mean becoming passive or never working to change difficult situations. It means starting from a clear recognition of the current reality rather than from resistance to it. You can't skillfully respond to a problem you refuse to acknowledge. Acceptance is the foundation for effective action, not a substitute for it.
6. Being Okay with Discomfort: So much of our suffering comes from trying to avoid discomfort—physical, emotional, psychological. But discomfort is part of life, and trying to eliminate it often creates more problems than the original discomfort. Learning to be okay with reasonable amounts of discomfort—to sit with difficult emotions rather than immediately reaching for distraction—is a profound skill.
7. Watching Your Resistance: Pay attention to the difference between discomfort itself and your resistance to discomfort. Often, it's not the difficult emotion or situation that causes the most suffering—it's your fight against it. Notice when you're arguing with reality, trying to push away what's present, or telling yourself that what's happening shouldn't be happening.
8. Being Curious: Approach your experience with the mind of a scientist or explorer. Instead of immediately judging things as good or bad, right or wrong, become curious about them. What is this emotion like? What happens if I don't immediately try to fix this problem? What might I learn from this difficult person or challenging situation?
9. Being Grateful: Gratitude isn't just a nice feeling—it's a practice of recognizing the countless supports that make your life possible. The air you breathe, the food that nourishes you, the people who care about you, the infrastructure that supports your daily life—when you really pay attention, you realize you're surrounded by gifts. Gratitude shifts attention from what's missing to what's present.
10. Letting Go of Control: We often exhaust ourselves trying to control things that are fundamentally beyond our control—other people's behavior, the outcome of our efforts, even our own thoughts and emotions. Learning to distinguish between what you can influence and what you can't is liberating. Focus your energy on what's within your sphere of influence and practice accepting what isn't.
11. Being Compassionate: This might be the most important tool of all. Compassion for others helps us remember that everyone is struggling with something, even when their behavior is difficult. Compassion for ourselves helps us learn from our mistakes without being crushed by them. Mindful living isn't about becoming perfect—it's about becoming more kind.
Understanding Karma as Cause and Effect
One of the most misunderstood concepts in Buddhism is karma. Popular culture often presents karma as some kind of cosmic justice system—"what goes around comes around"—but that's not quite accurate. If it were, good things would only happen to good people and bad things would only happen to bad people, which clearly isn't how life works.
Karma simply means "action" in Sanskrit. The law of karma is just the law of cause and effect: when you do something, something happens as a result. It's as simple and as complex as that.
The key insight is that what you do (or don’t do) affects not only yourself but others, and everything else. When you speak harshly to someone, that action has consequences—it affects that person's mood, which affects how they treat the next person they encounter, which ripples out in ways you'll never fully know. When you act with kindness, that also creates ripples.
This understanding brings a profound sense of responsibility. Not because you'll be punished or rewarded by some cosmic judge, but because you're constantly influencing the web of relationships you're part of. Your thoughts, words, and actions matter because they shape the world you live in.
The Art of Letting Go
At the heart of mindful living is the practice of letting go. This doesn't mean becoming passive or not caring about anything. It means learning to act wholeheartedly while holding outcomes lightly.
Think of it like breathing. You breathe in fully, but you don't try to hold onto the breath forever—you let it go and breathe in again. You breathe out completely, but you don't cling to the emptiness—you naturally draw in the next breath.
Living mindfully is like this. You engage fully with life, but you don't cling desperately to any particular state or outcome. You invest yourself completely in relationships, work, and creative projects, but you hold them with open hands rather than clenched fists.
This is beautifully illustrated in the famous Zen saying: "You are perfect as you are, and you could use a little improvement." You can fully accept yourself and your current situation while simultaneously working for positive change. You can love someone completely while recognizing they're not perfect. You can appreciate what you have while working toward different circumstances.
The Space Between Stimulus and Response
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Most of our suffering comes from reacting automatically to whatever happens, like a pinball bouncing off bumpers. Mindful living creates space between what happens and how you respond. In that space, you have choices.
Someone cuts you off in traffic. The stimulus is the same whether you're living mindfully or not. But if you're mindful, there's a moment of awareness before you react: "I notice anger arising. I notice the story I'm telling myself about this driver. I notice the choice I have about how to respond." Maybe you still feel annoyed, but you're not controlled by the annoyance.
Your child is having a meltdown in a grocery store. The stimulus is the same. But mindfulness creates space to think: "My child is overwhelmed and doesn't have the skills to handle these feelings yet. I feel embarrassed and frustrated, and that's natural. How can I respond in a way that helps both of us?"
This space doesn't eliminate difficult emotions or challenging situations. It gives you more choice about how to work with them.
The Paradox of Effort and Ease
Living mindfully requires a particular kind of effort—alert but not tense, persistent but not forced. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. If you grip the handlebars too tightly and tense every muscle, you'll wobble and probably fall. If you're completely relaxed and don't make any effort to balance, you'll also fall. The skill is in finding the right balance of effort and ease.
The same is true with mindfulness. Too much effort becomes self-conscious striving that gets in its own way. Too little effort becomes spiritual laziness where you're not really paying attention. The art is in finding that middle way—what Buddhists call the "Wise Effort" that's sustainable over time.
This is why I emphasize practice over perfection. You're not trying to become mindful once and for all. You're developing the habit of returning to mindfulness whenever you notice you've drifted into autopilot. The goal isn't never to get distracted—it's to notice when you're distracted and gently return.
Put It Into Practice
This week, I invite you to experiment with bringing mindful attention to routine activities. Choose one daily activity—it could be brushing your teeth, making coffee, walking from your car to your office, or eating lunch. For that one activity, practice being fully present.
When your mind wanders to other things (and it will), gently notice and return your attention to the sensory experience of what you're doing. What do you see, hear, feel, smell, taste? What do you notice when you're fully here for this ordinary activity?
Also, try the "pause practice" a few times this week. Before responding to a text message, email, or in conversation, take one conscious breath. Feel it all the way in, all the way out. This tiny pause can change everything about how you respond.
Finally, experiment with the gratitude practice. Once a day, pause and mentally list three things you can appreciate about your current circumstances. They don't need to be big things—the warmth of sunlight through a window, a friend's text message, the fact that your car started this morning. Notice how shifting attention to what's present (rather than what's missing) affects your experience.
Journaling Prompts
- What would you do differently if you knew you had one year to live? What does this tell you about what really matters to you?
- When do you feel most present and alive? What conditions or activities naturally bring you into the present moment?
- Of the 11 tools for mindfulness, which ones resonate most with you? Which ones seem most challenging? Why?
- Think about a recent situation where you reacted automatically rather than responding thoughtfully. If you could replay it with more mindfulness, what might you do differently?
- What are you grateful for right now that you usually take for granted? How does focusing on these things change your experience of this moment?
- Where in your life are you trying to control things that are fundamentally beyond your control? What would it mean to let go while still caring?
Going Deeper
To explore these themes further, listen to Episode 5 of the Secular Buddhism podcast: "Death, Karma, and Mindful Living."
In the next module, we begin exploring the Eightfold Path—the practical framework the Buddha laid out for living with wisdom and compassion. We'll start with the foundation of wisdom: learning to see clearly and setting wise intentions.
This is where the rubber meets the road, where understanding becomes practice, where philosophy becomes a way of life.