All The Thoughts One Can Think

Welcome to 2021 everyone! I hope you had a nice holiday season and tried to find at least a bit of time in restful reflection. I tried to give myself days and distance from anything work related so that I could reflect on goals for 2021 and residual thoughts that were left unthought from 2020. 

I usually have difficulty giving myself that distance. I read Gabor Mate's When the Body Says No and one of the things he mentioned is that folk tend to be addicted to stress and stressful environments and when that stress is gone it can create boredom. I think we can all agree that we have had our fair share of stress in 2020. However, it seemed much easier than usual to let go for a while this holiday season, and I think it is because collectively we have done so much in higher education over the last 9 months so a break was long overdue.

However, I will be honest and say there were times where there was a need to "to do list" something, and judging from Twitter I am not alone. Sadly, what that meant is even my reflection time became this sort of residual grad school trauma of "quick think of something clever you are wasting reflection time." So of course that led me to look up the etymology of "waste" which I discovered has the same root as "vast" so that was settling- that even in potential thought waste there is also thought vastness. 

Ultimately, this etymological trail lead me to a word that is very much going to be my focus for 2021: meaningful. 

• How do we define something as meaningful?
• What is meaningful thought? 
• What is meaningful action? 
• How can we make pedagogy more meaningful? 
• How can we create meaningful inclusion and access? 

As you can see there were many threads here but the root being that meaningful etymologically is connected to remembering, to highlighting what has significance, and thus for me, as a sensory scholar that went to how we can create significant memory through different kinds of sensation. A phenomenology of meaningfulness necessarily coincides with mindfulness.  

Mindfulness is a term used very often on the assumption that it is the same for everyone. I am here to say that it is important to remember that mindfulness is extremely contextual. One of the most common mindfulness exercises showcased in professional development or stress workshops is the "5 senses exercise." This exercise asks participants to focus on things you can see, then things you can hear, then things you can taste, and things you can smell, and things you can touch in order to ground the participant in the moment. It is a really ableist exercise because it assumes that folk participating would have all 5 senses and I would love to see discussion about this. As someone who is anosmatic and with tinnitus, I can't smell anything, nor can I focus on hearing things without low pitched ringing. 

So how do we get to a more meaningful practice of mindfulness that isn't ableist? With context. Frame mindfulness as contextual and acknowledge that not everyone will be able to use all senses to ground themselves in the moment. Other strategies need to be used. There needs to be a movement away from a belief in homogeneous positionality which is problematic. If there is an assumption that everyone's experience is the same, there will be a reinforcement of traumatic triggers. It was only in revisiting this 5 senses exercise over the holidays that I realized that my tinnitus is much worse than it used to be. Our senses do a lot for us, but they cannot be the only way in to an activity (in true UDL fashion).

As you can see there was a lot of thoughts to be thought over the holidays. Contemplating words as a possible framework of expression when one is alienated from different aspects of the sensory. The traumatic residue of the year that was 2020, carried forward and informing our theories and practices. If we want to move into 2021 with meaning, we need to be prepared to engage and question what is understood as common practice, question what is being normalized. We owe it to each other to be more mindful of positionality and context, especially in a time where our world is making it so difficult to just stop and think our thoughts.