84 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 2013, 270). However, ordinariness in our everyday lives remains important and still has meaning. An example is in our self-reflection. Many of us self-reflect to gauge how we feel or what we think. Interestingly, mindfulness and ordinariness are components of that reflection. Mindfulness lets us consider our thoughts and feelings, while ordinariness connects us to everyday tasks (Epstein 1999, 883; Raab 2014, 101). It is these ordinary tasks where our real lives occur and bring credence to our reflections. Intriguingly, the ordinary can be a pathway for exploring new aspects of our everyday lives and social interactions. According to Olendzki (2009, 43), the content of our attention is not necessarily the important part of mindfulness. In other words, how we pay attention is crucial. Pausing and noticing our breath or any ordinary activity should occur with careful attention. With this careful attention, we can better investigate the ebb and flow of the ordinary experience that runs through our daily lives. In further exploring the ordinary, Migid (2020, 377) considers mindfulness as an ordinary state of mind. In this sense, it is not just the moments of our day where ordinariness matters. There is also an ordinariness of our mind-state. Rather than an embellishment of extraordinary frames of consciousness or compassion, Migid describes mindfulness as an ordinary cognitive state that is with us generally throughout the day. After the depictions above, we may feel that the ordinary remains dreary and uninteresting. Of course, such a feeling makes sense — sitting on a bus or parking a car are particularly tedious tasks. However, as Moran (2005, 169) suggests, to change our everyday lives, we must view these ordinary activities as serious and real spaces of living. 9 Attention to Everyday Social Categorization This article began with a discussion of mindfulness, how it enables us to pay attention to the present moment, and how we can use mindfulness to resolve personal and social challenges. It then described how mindfulness could be employed to battle social categorization, how mindfulness connects to the everyday and the significance of the everyday and ordinary aspects of our daily lives. Next, we discuss paying attention to our everyday social categorizations. Mindful attention is important because this attention, in our everyday and ordinary lives, can be employed to counter social categorization in several ways. For example, in our shift to resolve social categorization, attention is not simply a short glance and then a turn elsewhere. Instead, attention is a complete focus from the person onto the thing being considered (Deroche 2021, 874), which is our social interaction. Also, fusing attention and the present enables mindfulness to function from moment to moment (Deroche 2021, 876). In the context of social categorization, this attention enables us to be aware of all our moments of social interaction throughout the day. Additionally, mindfulness means paying attention in a way that is purposeful and without judgment (Gethin 2011, 269). This nonjudgmental mode of attention is valuable in being open and unbiased in our social interactions. Furthermore, attention is also action as a continual structuring of awareness and experience (Ganeri 2017, 12). This ongoing structuring in the context of social categorization can be valuable in our everyday lives. It enables our awareness and experience to inform one another in a shifting framework of understanding ourselves and our interactions with others. Finally, attention to our subtle nuances, even in a cafe, enables us to see the rhythms of social interactions. From this mindful view, we can better understand the effect of our social interactions on others in our everyday lives (Back 2015, 821). As Thich Nhat Hanh (2020, 60) emphasizes, each of our everyday activities is significant: Every action, every thought has an effect. Even if I just clap my hands, the effect is everywhere, even in faraway galaxies. Every sitting, every walking, every smile will have an effect on your own daily life, and the life of other people also, and practice must be based on that. The more mindfully attentive we are of our everyday actions, the more we may notice how we categorize others. Nowhere is this mindful attention more vital than where challenged individuals, minority families, and displaced communities struggle to survive and grow. 10 Conclusion This article began with a discussion of traditional Buddhist mindfulness, how it includes aspects of the Buddhist doctrine, how mindfulness is at the heart of the tradition, and how it can be a means against human biases that influence us to categorize people socially. It showed that our current Western view of mindfulness is similar to the traditional view though it does not include aspects of the Buddhist doctrine. Next, the article described how our social interactions could benefit from traditional and contemporary mindfulness. It then discussed how action is essential to mindfulness and
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