practice in daily life or no?:

Some meditation systems emphasize the importance of practicing in the midst of daily life or making daily life part of the practice.

As opposed to "firewalling" practice, or practicing in a carefully delimited box and forgetting about it at other times, it can be helpful to reflect or feel into past or future practice in stolen moments. And, it's certainly ok to do a little bit of practice, self-reflection, gathering oneself in those stolen moments or otherwise interleaved at other times.

But, generally, it can actually be good to not mix practice with the activities of daily life. As in, it's ok to practice when praticing and to just live when living.

The ultimate goal of the practice is sort of to "get lost in life" (safely, constructively, endorsedly), anyway.

And practicing in daily life or using daily life activities for practice is sort of adding something extra to life, an extra thing, extra metacognition, something. And this can interfere with spontaneous, constructive action.

It can be better to use practice to alter the "upstream causal factors" that indirectly trickle down to affect experience and behavior and choices, in daily life.

So practice does, short-run and long-run, affect daily life, of course.

And, eventually, practice sort of eats itself:

The lines between practice and daily life do blur, do mix.

There becomes just one seamless thing, with context dependent, manifold evolving qualities, whether "on the cushion" or off.

So/but, anyway, here, in this practice system, we're sort of coming at this blurring/mixing, indirectly, from the practice side, rather than top-down trying to mix practice and daily life directly.

Importantly, doing any of the practices is X% finding new things to do and/but Y% finding ways you're already doing these things, and, of course, eventually it's X+Y% the practice doing you, or finding yourself naturally slipping into the practices, or participating in the practices, or participating in life and the practices, all at once, and/or simply, eventually, perhaps thousands and thousands of hours in, there's just life, just this.

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Addendum / update:

There's some nuance here. This will be a partial restatement of the above with maybe a tiny bit more.

I do think it's especially ok and good to take "stolen moments," "quiet moments," to collect oneself amidst relatively continuous activity.

buttt, if one is sort of adding or mixing meditation into things, then that's maybe potentially problematic. The first-pass reasoning-ish is that the eventual goal is to sort of be "lost in life with no remainder," anyway, then adding or mixing meditation is sort of the opposite of that, unless locally strategic somehow.

But, buttt, butttt, redo-to-undo, sometimes, can be greatly facilitated by contextual cues or triggers. In some sense, there is no other time to "meditate" except "in life," whether amidst activity or in a quiet room. of course, a quiet room with minimal likelihood of interruption is very facilitative, too! This is especially the case when in-life contextual cues or triggers for things are hard to come by or "the real thing" is too intense, demanding, continuous to safely admit anything but doing that thing. In those cases retrospective and prospective engagement can be better, or altering the context or intensity of the thing if at all possible.

And, buttttttt, in any case, if meditation-y things naturally come up in the midst of other activities, that can be great! In any case, if you (simply) find yourself doing meditation-y things in context, if what's happening feels natural, relatively costless, etc., then that's probably or often fine and good!

Anyway, some nuance, and qualifying here^.

[Thanks to a collaborator who helped prompte teasing out these distinctions a bit more.]