[dexderp]

I like the quote in your about @ Dang. Very helpful:

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression." Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943

[dang]

I'm glad! I finally got a copy of the paper and unfortunately that quote was the only interesting thing in it, as far as I could tell. But Milner is fascinating and did many other things - for example she wrote a brilliant book called "A life of one's own" about experiments she did with self-observation. She was already using the word 'mindfulness' in 1934.

[zh3]

The parent comment about conflict made me think that surely Montaigne must have an essay "On Conflict". Not so, but a quick search turned up [0].

More generally Montaigne's writings (which you may well know) are sometimes cited as "mindfulness" long before the term was invented [1].

[0] https://psyche.co/ideas/for-montaigne-verbal-jousting-is-the...

[1] https://thehouseilivein.me/2023/10/21/my-year-with-montaigne...