The following is an excerpt from Looking at Mindfulness, in which author Christophe Andre explores how viewing art or reading poetry can help achieve a sense of calm.
Calm, attentive eyes in an attractive, quietly intelligent face, expressing neither benevolence nor hostility, just a desire to understand correctly and in detail. This is Thomas More, amazingly alive in this vibrant portrait painted five hundred years ago. An eternity. This painting by Hans Holbein, who was his friend, emphasizes More’s sharpness of mind and his ability at once to engage and step back. He was one of the world’s movers and shakers, an important, powerful person — look at his rich attire and the gold chain attesting to his services to his king. He holds a small piece of paper, perhaps as a sign of his intense intellectual activity. He was also a brave humanist of great integrity, a reformer and visionary, the author of the famous book Utopia and a friend of the great philosopher Erasmus. He was an affectionate, attentive father, an unusual thing in his day. In a letter to his daughter Margaret he wrote, “For I assure you that, rather than allow my children to be idle and slothful, I would make a sacrifice of wealth, and bid adieu to other cares and business to attend to my children and my family, amongst whom none is more dear to me than yourself, my beloved daughter.” Until her dying day Margaret preserved her father’s decapitated head.
Thomas More, Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543)
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And then there’s impermanence, which teaches us that nothing lasts forever and that everything that happens is a matter of composition and decomposition, organization and disorganization, all of it transitory and ephemeral. There’s nothing distressing about this either — on the contrary, it is illuminating and liberating.
As Paul Valéry observed, “The mind flits from one silliness to the next, as a bird flits from branch to branch. It can do nothing else. The main thing is not to feel stable on any one of them.” Our minds need transitory certainties, just as birds need branches. But if we test them against interdependence, emptiness and impermanence, we will suffer less, and cause others less suffering too.
Reprinted from LOOKING AT MINDFULNESS by Christophe André (translated by Trista Selous) with permission of Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2011 by L’Iconoclaste, translation copyright © 2014 by Rider Books
