A recent comment suggested I was writing about an ideal world, and that worried me.

The puzzle and challenge for me is the everyday: how we can better link insights into our human condition to our working lives, to our personal and our social lives, to the national agenda. The insights come from Zen and wider Buddhist ideas and practice, but they connect easily with our own Western traditions. Most of us fully appreciate the benefits of finding peace and calm in our lives, though we protest that we’re too busy to slow down. We regret our ill-temper, bouts of anger, self-serving pleasures. If we show kindness and compassion we’re pleased and rather proud of ourselves. We got it right for once.

But we don’t act on what we know, and I’m arguing that it’s not so difficult. Meditating, mindfulness, walking, even standing still, shutting out 24-hour news and 24-hour noise, setting aside space for ourselves – start small, just get out for a walk, it’s no need to be heavy duty. You don’t need to sit in a triple lotus…

(A fridge magnet I saw today ran as follows: ‘Stress is the confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s basic desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately deserves it.’ I love it – and it’s not quite what I’m arguing.)

You may have read about a new series: Ladybird books for adults. Already bestsellers. There’s even one on mindfulness. And one on dating. Mindfulness fits my argument slightly better. But if that’s too trendy, then I still like the basic idea. Start simple. (One date at a time.) Don’t over complicate.

Benefits – I hope they’re evident from what I’ve written elsewhere, if they’re not I’ve failed miserably.

I’m not anticipating a brave new dispensation just around the corner. If for some there’s a sense of a new consciousness, a new wisdom, which could yet change the world, then I thought that forty and more years ago, and it didn’t happen. I’m none too optimistic now about it catching on with readers of the Daily Mail, or indeed the billion plus who make up the Han population of China.

Though who knows, give them time.

For now 82 million members of the Communist Party in China have a lockdown on opinion. And mindfulness and the Daily Mail don’t go too well together, though if you’re into mindfulness and an avid reader of the Mail, then I apologise.

But if we can be simply a little slower to judgement, look a little more widely before we leap, then by small increments we can make the world a better place. And who know we might just have a Great Leap Forward.