A first visit to the center
In March 2025 I attended the mindfulness symposium organized by the Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health at Harvard University. It was my first visit to the center, and I had been looking forward to it the night before. The center’s work places mindfulness within public health, asking how attention and presence relate to well-being at the scale of populations as well as individuals, which connects to my own interest in behavioral health and the signals that reflect it.
I found myself sitting next to Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the most prominent figures in mindfulness and an MIT alumnus. A molecular biologist by training, he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 and developed its Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. I asked him what he was up to these days, what excited him, and what was next in mindfulness.
A brief exchange I carry with me
His answer was simple: “I am fully present in the moment, right now here with you.” I have kept it as a teaching for everyday life, a reminder to meet the person in front of you rather than the next thing on the list, and I thanked him for it. The exchange connected decades of scientific and clinical work on mindfulness with a practical question about attention and the quality of the lives around us.