We all know we ought not to doomscroll, or to make snarky comments, or to snack mindlessly, or to endlessly replay in our minds that conversation where we felt misunderstood or slighted. And this ”ought” is not imposed from the outside. It’s not that we’ll be judged by someone. It’s just that if we want to be happy, if we want to get things done, if we want to experience joy and enthusiasm and meaning and fun, we’d better not do those things. Not too much, anyway.
We even know how to not do them. It’s not rocket science in the first place, and there are plenty of genuinely effective methods out there just one Google search away. But sometimes… we do those things anyway. As entrepreneur Derek Sivers famously put it (I’m told), if information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with 6-pack abs.
(In the interest of transparency, let me just state that the practice I describe in this post hasn’t made me a billionaire with 6-pack abs. But give it time.)
To stop doing something that is holding us back, we need to be vigilant. To not miss opportunities to do things that move us forward, we need to be vigilant. We know what benefits us and what harms us, and all that remains is to actually do the former and not do the latter.
There is a Pāli word for this vigilance, this diligence. It’s appamāda, translated as ‘heedfulness’. (Appamāda is the negation of pamāda, meaning ‘heedlessness’ or ‘negligence’.) The Buddha was famously bullish on appamāda, calling it the quality that encompasses all skillful qualities. In fact, according to the Pāli canon, his last words to his followers were "appamādena sampādetha" – bring your task to completion through heedfulness.
It would be nice if we could just decide to be heedful. But knowing myself, it’s clear to me that if I pledged right now to be heedful every waking hour of the rest of my life, it would simply not happen. I would be enthusiastic about it for a couple of hours, and then, come evening, I would start to forget. To