Now we walk mindfully. . .

It has been a while again, even longer this time, since I've updated. I do feel a bit guilty for neglecting my blog for so long, but here's an extra long update to make up for it.

Soon after my last entry, I signed a lease and now have live in a basement flat in Dun Laoghaire, which is a small town just 20 minutes or so outside of Dublin. It's about halfway between center city and my work, which is perfect: close enough to work that it's not a hassle in the morning, and close enough to the city that I can go into town fairly quickly. More personally, I have gotten settled. Even the first week in my apartment was a bit hectic, but I am feeling pretty comfortable, and I have two very pleasant roommates, John and Catherine, who are both from Cork and work in the area.
[My house from the outside]

[The harbor in Dun Laoghaire]

A couple weeks ago, I joined some co-workers for a guided tour of Kilmainham Gaol, an old jail in Dublin. The oldest part of the jail was built in 1796, but was added to as growing imprisonment required. For much of the prison's activity, it was used as a political prison during the rebellions. The jail also received a lot of prisoners for petty theft during the famine. Our tour guide showed a picture from a prison record that showed the sentencing of 3 children in their early teens, all convicted of the same crime: stealing 4 loaves of bread.

The tour had a lot of prison and reform theory, which reminded me a lot of the information (the famous pictures of old jails with children dancing on the table and diagrams of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon) at Eastern State Penitentiary, the first modern prison in the US. The thought behind such a jail was that it was possible to reform people through silence, solitude, and supervision. As such, prisoners were not allowed to speak to each other, all of the cells featured a small hole through which guards could look in to check on prisoners, and each cell was meant to hold only one person; although, this last stipulation was relaxed as the courts sentenced more people than the prison had room for. Sometimes the small cells housed 12 or more people. The windows in the jail have no glass, with the intent that the cold draft would make the occupants uncomfortable and prisoners slept on wooden planks - or on wet straw if there were not enough "beds" to go around. A quote displayed in the museum from George Bernard Shaw frames these conditions and their justification particularly well: "If the prison does not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill."

I would say that the best part of the tour, by far, was the amount of political history that came with it. My favorite parts were the stories about Robert Emmett, an Irish nationalist who was executed at Kilmainham. After his sentencing, Emmett made a speech, which is used in a lot of pro-democracy rhetoric. The jail was closed in the early 20th century, and reopened in the mid-1980's after 20 years of restoration work, which was done entirely by volunteers. Aside from the prison literature and the history lesson, the jail is also visually stunning.

After visiting the prison, we went out for coffee, after which a few of us went walking around the city. Pia, one of the other interns, was saying that she used to work for a campus Centre for Mindfulness, where they coordinate study on being more mindful. This just amounts to living more in the moment and being more perceptive of your surroundings, body, and natural tendencies. We discussed it for a while: what it means for us to be mindful, how we might do this without realising it, how it might not be productive to do this constantly, and also discussed people who we know who are naturally more mindful. Pia joked that her boyfriend, who had partcipated in some of the Centre's mindfulness practices, would tease her about it on walks and say, "Now Pia, we walk mindfully."

[Mindful appreciation of a Dublin sunset]

I think mindfulness is something that becomes less frequent with age - or at least is something that people lose as they grow into early adulthood. I can remember when going somewhere, even if it was an errand with my mom, had nothing to do with the goal itself. What was fascinating then was all of the things I would see along the journey. Pia's explanation for this loss was that as people get older, they start to internalize their surroundings more, and they let their actions become guided by norms. Especially because we talked about this in a dichotomy of mindfulness vs. productivity, I think that mindfulness might play an important role in work socialisation. Individuals form work habits and employability skills around being more goal oriented, but perhaps this is to some degree at the expense of mindfulness. It's also possible that I just remember the times when I was mindful when I was young, rather than the times that I was centered around a goal. But, I think also it's a real possibility that focusing on projects and goals eliminates the time available for perceiving things, especially those things that do not directly or obviously relate to those goals. That is not to say that this is definitively a negative phenomenon, but I do think that it's something that occurs. That is something definitely nice about my work here. I have quite a bit of time to complete projects. It gives me time to fully appreciate them and their implications, which is definitely not something that I've experience in other jobs previously.

Lastly, I submitted a proposal for a senior thesis last week, and I am waiting to hear back. I am going to write on Short-Time Compensation in the US. That's part of the reason that I haven't updated in a while; I was totally absorbed by that process. By the end of it, I was so exhausted and I couldn't think about anything else. But now, it's in, and I can relax. I will still work on it, obviously, but without an impending deadline, I can appreciate the process more leisurely while I pay attention to other things in front of me.

Now Stuart, we walk mindfully.