Mindfulness and Perspective

In most other schools, Mindfulness and Perspective are said to be important. However, The students are never asked to think about them and because they never have to think about them, they are never put into practice. At our school these and other Habits of Mind are all frequently discussed and put into action.

Mindfulness means being mindful of your peers their feelings and how your actions effect them. You should always put the feelings of others before your own. The question we learned to help us know if we were being mindful was "how will my actions effect others?". That question doesn't just apply to the feelings of others. For example, if you are working on a project and you want to use this piece of cardboard. You need to take into consideration how you using that cardboard will effect others, how it may disadvantage them. To be mindful you need to, not just think about the feelings of others, but, also the physical consequences of your actions.

Perspective is a big part to fully understanding Mindfulness. In my opinion you can't be mindful of others until you learn how to look at it from their perspective. I also believe that Perspective is one of the harder Habits of Mind to grasp. It is easy to be aware of the feelings of others. But it is much harder to under stand those emotions and see them from their perspective.

In summary, there is much more to mindfulness then just feeling empathy. Perspective is more difficult to grasp than Mindfulness and understanding perspective is necessary to understanding Mindfulness.