Fill vs Fulfill

In the book - 'Teaching Mindfulness', it talks about the idea of filling vs fulfilling. This is discussed in the context of training mindfulness in terms of it being important for the trainer not to fill the class with content and jeopardise the experience of exploring mindfulness and exploring what naturally and spontaneously arises (see the 'overlearning' post for more on this).

I see many parallels here with life itself. I recently went to India for three weeks on my own and for the first time, resisted the temptation to fill the holiday with a day to day plan. Instead, I arrived and I went with the flow - reacting in the moment to opportunities, people, navigating decisions about what to do next and with whom. It was indeed very fulfilling because space was available to learn more about myself and others. However, this is easy to do on holiday - so what about home life? How much of that do we fill with things and how much of it do we spend time fulfilling and being fulfilled? How many of things we really want to do - do we actually do?

In this culture of living at speed, earning money, buying things, promotions etc - is our happiness being jeopardised without us realising it? Is there enough 'fulfilling' going on? What do we do with our time and how would we categorise it - filling time with no or only short lived benefit or fulfilling time contributing to a deeper state of happiness?

Coming back to training - on any topic - this would also be an interesting exercise for reviewing session plans. Are there parts of the session plans where we are filling in time with content? How much of the content is fulfilling the learning objectives and if so, how? Is the course so full with content that there isn't much room for spontaneity and reacting in the moment?

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