Fortunately, my assistant isn’t into salad. This is his new favorite position.

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I’m a scholar of plans, ideas, and suggestions to eliminate or soften anxiety. Right now, America is one of the Western world’s most anxious nations. I find myself looking at the many ideas offered for dealing with anxiety, from shrinks to pills to Buddhist ideas of focusing narrowly on today, or the now, as they put it.

Mindfulness, as it is called, is one of the hottest ideas in the Spiritual world. Everybody talks about it, but I knew few people who actually do it for a whole day or longer. That doesn’t fit with high-powered America, where it pours in like wind in a storm. A tech or other problem shows up almost every day, and it doesn’t wait for a two- or three-sign-off.

“Every day and every hour,” wrote the late Thich Nhat Hanh, “that’s easy to say but to carry it out in practice is not.”

I agree; I can’t really focus on staying in the moment every hour or every day. It’s a nice idea, but my mind, God help me,

just doesn’t work that way.

But I am trying it out in a less intense way – I’m taking life one day at a time, overall, but not necessarily every second. I do say today, Tuesday, I’m okay. We are both healthy; we have what we need for today; we can do our work and feel safe and secure, despite the tsunami of hate and division swirling all around us.

We can’t control the world, but we can control our lives, one day at a time. We can’t make a day a peaceful one by focusing on nature rather than the news. For me, this is the flower’s lesson.

“In principle,” wrote Hanh, “every day should be our day, and every hour your hour.” It is easy to say, but not something I can do.

I’ll take the idea and try to make it mine. I think we each need our own practice.

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