It starts with just one person. You perhaps. Dedicating a small part of your day every day to nurture your peace of mind, and clear away all the irks and accumulated baggage of the past. In time your mind become clearer, so you make wiser decisions, refrain from knee-jerk reactions, and everyone around you benefits from your clarity of thought.

In time your mind becomes calmer, more tranquil, so you let things go that you previously might have reacted negatively to. Because of this you stop collecting baggage, and a lot of the old resentments, prejudices and irrational dislikes that you’ve gathered over decades, start to dissipate from the core of your mind.

You become increasingly liberated, freed from the junk of life, and in that new clear space you can flourish with an open mind, and a wish to do no harm to anything that lives, and to help where you can. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the First Minister, a nurse, the CEO of a major FTSE global corporation, or an unemployed man or woman. Your mind is quite simply better than it was before, and not only you, but all those around you will benefit from the change inside you.

If we can spread it from just one person, to two, to twenty two, to two thousand, to two hundred thousand, to two million, finally to all 5.5 million of us here in Scotland, think what that would mean to us all.

The prisons emptied. No more bigotry. No more racism. No more sexism. Rational, open-minded political and constitutional discussions. A more prosperous economy because our business people have sharper minds, but a fairer one because everyone realises we all need all of us on board and sharing what we gain.

I know. Some of you might be thinking this is La La Land. Maybe it is. But each and every step in that direction makes someone’s life better, and that is not an unrealistic dream. And if you can transform one person’s life then, all else being equal, you can do the same for five million people, over time, with a clear vision, a sound strategy, and properly budgeted.

I have personally witnessed people emerge from degrees of anxiety so bad that they fear leaving their home, people who moved from being suicidal to regaining a love of life. I have answered questions on the mind and the challenge of changing what’s inside them, from prisoners in Scotland’s highest security prisons, prisoners who want to totally change but need the tools and the motivation. Change is possible. The research does show this. The extent to which such change can be achieved depends on the unique make up of each person. Maybe some people can’t change their genetic or life-shaped destructive or unhappy mental traits, but we don’t know that, so we should work on the assumption that people can change, and help them try to do so if they want it.

There are concerns about such a vision, and about using mindfulness to achieve it. Many centre around a profound misunderstanding of what mindfulness is, namely the idea of a fluffy, new age, stress relief thing. The other concern relates to how a philosophy and set of practices like mindfulness fit or don’t fit with existing faiths add philosophies, especially as mindfulness was in fact created as a method by the Buddha. But in my experience mindfulness can sit perfectly comfortably with all faiths and with agnostics and atheists, and indeed can enhance their own understanding of their way of seeing life, because the clarity of thought that mindfulness brings may bring new insights into faiths and philosophies, to the benefit of the individual.

So let’s not do this mindfulness thing quietly and meekly. Why not imagine a completely mentally healthy Scottish population, from babies to folk celebrating their one hundredth birthday? I really believe, if we actually want it deep down, that we can reduce and ultimately eliminate all of the mental traits that so inhibit of love of life. I believe we can use mindfulness to so improve our thinking abilities and our sense of altruism and compassion, that these qualities combined can help us help those who have suffered most in our society, and those whose destructive or self-destructive behaviours stem from neglected or violent upbringings.

But first of all we need to work on ourselves, and we need a clear vision of a healthy, peaceful Scotland. Let’s go for it.