Mindfulness is mainstream it seems.

CBS. 60 Minutes. Anderson Cooper. Doesn’t get more mainstream than that.

It’s a movement, Cooper says.

I’m not sure about that. But I sure hope so.

Because, you see, culturally, we’ve lost our focus; we’ve lost our edge.

We’ve lost our ability to be present; to be here now.

We dwell in a state of distraction.

We’ve become addicted to forward motion; we keep on going like hamsters on a wheel.

We’ve become addicted to the stimulation and outside input, checking and re-checking our smartphones and our tablets and our emails; responding incessantly to the phone calls and messages and notifications and alerts. Overwhelmed and inundated by the expectations and the deadlines and the demands, endeavoring to pay attention to everything and succeeding only at a continuous partial attention.

We’ve become addicted, as Jim Collins, author of that wonderful business book, Good to Great, says… we’ve become addicted to the undisciplined pursuit of more.

The greatest crisis of our age is not terror in the world; it is the terror that we allow within ourselves.

The greatest crisis of our age is not that we don’t have enough, but that we have too much: too much information; too much noise; too much stimulation; too much to do.

The greatest crisis of our age is that we have lost touch with that that place of quiet, that still point within us.

We’ve lost the capacity to create space for ourselves.

We’ve lost the capacity to sit still, to be still, to know the beauty and the grandeur of the here and now.

We’ve lost the capacity to be: To just be.

Mindfulness calls us to slow down; to stop; to show up in this moment; to be present.

To be. Here. Now.

Mindfulness is fitness for the brain. It is a powerful tool that allows us to laser focus our attention; and beat overwhelm.

Cooper, on 60 Minutes, interviewed the grand daddy of the mindfulness movement, Jon Kabat Zinn. Zinn’s seminal book: Wherever You Go There You Are.

Zinn, who has been at it for forty years, teaches that mindfulness is simple (simple, not easy as Jim Rohn was fond of saying). It’s about being aware of where you are, of what you’re doing in this moment, of being aware of your breath, of focusing in the present moment itself… rather than constantly thinking about the next one… and the next (Zinn, only half jokingly, says that when we live continuously focused on the next moment, we miss the present, only to end up dead.)

He says we wake up thinking about our calendars, our appointments, of all the things we have to do, rather than to appreciate the fact that we’ve woken to a new day of our one and only life.

We get into the shower… and rather than just enjoying the shower with all of its wonderful attendant sensations, we think about all the people we need talk to and see. And suddenly, in that moment, we’re no longer alone in the shower. But rather unwittingly, we’ve invited that entire rabble into shower with us.

Perhaps it’s time to shower alone?