The Art of Living by Grant Snider

I have never been a particularly positive person. I think I've mellowed as I've gotten older, from the cynical grump I was in my twenties, but I'm not now, and probably never will be, the person you'd expect to read a book about mindfulness.

But sometimes you just follow creators that you read, even if they go in directions you normally wouldn't. And so I found myself reading a collection of comics with the subtitle Reflections on Mindfulness and the Overexamined Life.

The main title is The Art of Living - a bit grand, yes? the cynicism rises in me one more time to think it's claiming a bit much there - and it's by Grant Snider, a fine thoughtful cartoonist who is also a working orthodontist, a wonderful detail that I have to bring up every time I mention him.

It's a collection of his comics, originally published on his site Incidental Comics or in paying venues like The Believer. So if you have Incidental in your RSS reader, or otherwise check it regularly, some of this will be at least vaguely familiar.

And it is all on that rough theme laid out in the subtitle - paying attention to the world in front of you, slowing down to enjoy things, finding beauty where you can, that kind of thing. Enjoying life as it is, which I have to admit is sometimes the hardest thing in the world.

Snider has a hand-lettered "Attention Manifesto" up front, after a couple of cartoons to set a mood, and that list of things to do defines the sections of the book. They're all pretty standard mindfulness prompts: we can all admit that we know how to do all of this, it's just that actually doing it is not as simple.

Snider's work is a bit puckish, his drawing light and quick-looking and his people slightly sketchy-looking and standardized, the same unnamed cast going through life with the same concerns and problems. These comics aren't funny, since they're not trying to be - they're meditative, exploring a mood or a feeling or a thought, trying to focus or exploring why focus is so difficult.

I probably read this too quickly and didn't engage with it deeply enough, but I did find it a lovely palate cleaner, an extended moment of Zen to readjust my view of the world. I might not be as much the ideal audience for this as I was for Snider's previous book I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelves, but I enjoyed it more than I was worried I would. If you can calibrate that with your own interest in mindfulness, you should be able to tell if it will be helpful for you as well.