Try to count the moments in the last month when you were entirely where you were. Not thinking about the next thing while doing this one. Not somewhere else in your head while your body performed the necessary actions competently. Fully present, in the room, for whatever was actually happening in it.
Most people, doing this honestly, find very few. Some find none at all in a month and are genuinely shaken by the result, having never done the counting before. And then a natural calculation follows, which is that if a month contains almost none, then a decade contains almost none, and a whole life turns out to be a very long stretch of somebody not being there.
This is not a failure of character and that is worth saying clearly. It is simply what happens when nobody has ever suggested that presence is a thing which can be practised. We are trained in almost everything else from the age of five. Nobody spends an hour on this.
Where we go instead
There are only two places to go, and we go to them constantly, all day, in rotation. Backwards, into what already happened, rearranging it, defending ourselves in conversations that finished years ago and cannot be reopened. Or forwards, into what might happen, preparing for it, rehearsing it, worrying it into a manageable shape.
Both feel productive, which is why they are so difficult to give up. The past feels like understanding and the future feels like preparation, and neither is either. The past cannot be altered by any amount of returning to it, however careful. The future has never once matched a rehearsal, not for anybody, not once in the whole history of rehearsing. And while both are being conducted at length, the only place where anything is actually happening stands completely empty.
Life is not in the past and it is not in the future. It is here, in this moment, and everything else is thought about it. This is not hard to know. A great many people know it perfectly well and could give a reasonable account of it to anybody, and still spend most of the day somewhere other than here. That says something useful about the difference between knowing a thing and being able to do it.
The good moments are not the point
Everybody assumes presence is for the significant occasions. The celebration, the journey, the last conversation with somebody who will not be seen again. And it is true that those are the ones most regretted when they are missed, and the regret is sharp and permanent.
But those are rare and a life is not made of them. A life is made of the ordinary hours. The walk from one place to another. The kitchen in the evening. The half hour in which nothing whatsoever is happening. If presence is reserved for occasions, then it will be used perhaps forty times in a whole life, and everything else will pass unwitnessed by the only person it actually belonged to.
And there is something worse. Presence cannot be summoned for an occasion by somebody who never practises it the rest of the time. On the day it matters most, they will do exactly what they have been doing for thirty years, which is to be half elsewhere. They will notice afterwards, and there will be nothing whatsoever to be done about it.
The one way in
There is only one entrance and it is always open. It is whatever is in front of us now. Not a technique, not a retreat, not a change of circumstances, not a better year when things have calmed down. This, the thing actually being done, given full attention for as long as it can be held, which at first will be about nine seconds.
Nine seconds is not nothing. Nine seconds is more than most days contain and considerably more than most weeks. And the strange discovery waiting there is that ordinary things become almost unbearably vivid when they are actually attended to. So much so that people often retreat back into absence quite quickly, because the vividness is more than they had prepared for and nobody warned them it would be like that.
Why are we like this? Why should a species with so little time be so consistently absent from the little it has? There is no explanation that satisfies, and the question includes everybody who asks it, most of whom have spent today somewhere other than today.
