"Trying to Be More Present Isn't Enough"
by David Cain
"A million years from now, when alien anthropologists begin gathering evidence about what humans were like, they will definitely want to dig up the Self-help and Spiritual/Religion sections of our bookstores and libraries. There they will find direct evidence of what we yearned for and struggled with. One thing that might surprise them is that we really wanted to be more present, and we struggled to do so for some reason. Our visitors will find no evidence that other earth creatures – cats, fish, protozoa – suffered any such difficulty.
Humans though, the aliens will note, spent most of their adult lives distracted from what is happening around them by thoughts of what happened earlier or could happen later. This problem was so great among the human species that returning to “the present” became a central element of both their religious practices and popular culture.
People designed mental exercises to get better at residing in the present moment, involving listening to mountain streams or patiently watching candle flames. Others wrote poems and stories about achieving a fabled state of calm abiding - in which one was lucid, engaged, and at ease - with such fervor that some of these stories mutated into religions.
Authors wrote books like "Be Here Now", "Wherever You Go There You Are", and "The Tao of Pooh", and gave talks in university auditoriums and monasteries. Musicians wrote songs about the primacy of being present in life, including wistful appeals like "Do You Realize??" and tragic warnings like "Cat’s in the Cradle."
Being present, just like being in love, was such a ubiquitous subject for human art and conversation that it was hard to get away from it, especially as new handheld technologies made the problem worse.
Today, we’re at the climax of this struggle, which is why almost everything you can say about “being present” is a cliché. It’s commonplace to say things like, “Life is what’s happening while you’re making other plans,” and “Stop and smell the roses,” in order to remind ourselves of what we already know: that life is always ticking by, evaporating by the second, as we worry about how certain parts of it might go later.
We each do what we can to remember to be present. At this moment, someone somewhere is writing a haiku about the stillness of early morning hours. Someone else is taping an Eckhart Tolle quote to their bathroom mirror. Someone else is hanging a decorative faux-rustic plank in the hallway of a suburban home, hoping it will remind them to Live, Laugh, Love before it’s too late.
Working Against Gravity: Being reminded does seem to help. If I tell you to look away from your screen for a moment, and pause to take in the ambient sound, light, and mood of the moment, whether you’re in an office, a library, or a Dunkin Donuts, you might notice the familiar, sublime sense that life is indeed happening now - happening live. The great machine of the world is humming and moving, and you’re a part of it in a way Napoleon and Ben Franklin and Marilyn Monroe no longer are. Ah, right! Life! This is what you’re here for. This is what you worry about losing. If you want to live your life intentionally, it can only be done from here, in moments like this.
However, chances are good that later today, or even three minutes from now, you will no longer be feeling this potent sense of presence. You’ll still be doing things, but a subtle screen of preoccupation will have descended. Most of life will pass this way. The solution seems to be to try harder to remember. You must resolve now and forever to be more present! You must never forget to stop and smell the roses, seize the day, and Live Laugh Love as much as you can.
I’ve been writing about being present for years now, in the most angular and unclichéd ways I can think of, in the hopes that these ideas resonate despite the ubiquity of the basic message. I’ve recommended, for example, observing your surroundings as though you’re a visiting alien or time-traveler; carefully “tasting” elements of your sensory experience like a sommelier would wine; viewing the room you’re in as though it exists but you don’t, and many other eccentric practices - anything but another admonishment to just be more present.
I do that because the admonishments don’t work. After twenty years of reading, writing, and reflecting on this topic, I can tell you that you cannot become more present by resolving to be more present. Hanging cross-stitched mottoes on your walls and intermittently reading Ram Dass might trigger the occasional moment of presence, but will not significantly change how much of your life you spend being present and how much you spend preoccupied.
That’s because the human mind is mostly habitual and reflexive. It cannot will itself to be present for more than a few seconds. Whatever mental gravity pulled your attention into idle thinking in the first place will draw it away again, almost immediately. You can, anytime it occurs to you, direct your attention back to the present, to the sunshine on your face, to the sound of distant traffic, but just like a submerged volleyball, the attention doesn’t stay there. I’m almost certain - and maybe brain scientists will confirm this someday - that the part of the brain that directs your attention to something is voluntary, and the part that sustains attention on that something is basically involuntary.
And it’s the sustaining that’s most important. Residing mainly in the present, not just glimpsing it occasionally, is what staves off rumination and worry, makes ordinary moments lucid and meaningful, and delivers the kind of circumstance-independent well-being all those fables and sayings and songs were talking about.
The Missing Key to Being More Present: There is a way to become significantly more present that does work with our fickle, fretting human minds. You have to leverage the mind’s habitual and reflexive nature. Instead of consciously “trying to be more present,” you gently train your own attention, like you’re training a dog, to locate and be with present moment experience as a normal and natural reflex.
You do this by setting aside a short period every day, say ten minutes to start, and using it to practice pointing your attention at something - some sensation, sight, or sound -- and observing it with a certain kind of alert curiosity.
As I said above, the human mind can only sustain this kind of voluntary focus for a few seconds at time - certainly not ten minutes - but those few seconds are enough to work with. You essentially fill that ten-minute period of practice as densely as possible with these 3- to 5-second stretches of aware presence. After doing this regularly for a few days or weeks, you might notice that your attention simply ends up in the present more often. You’re going about your day, and a certain lucidity descends on the moment as you get a mug from the cupboard or answer the phone.
Note that these moments of presence happen without your having to try or remember to try. Your attention automatically lands in the present because your mind has become more accustomed to it and is inclined to return there.
What’s happening is you’re changing the mind’s gravitational center. The practice periods develop the same kind of muscle-memory-like familiarity that happens when the fingers of a piano student begin to automatically find the right keys, except that instead of fingers finding keys it’s your attention finding the present moment. The present gradually becomes the resting place. The song begins to play itself. This daily period of attentional training is a form of meditation. Anyone can do it - you already have the basic human talent of focusing on something for a few seconds."
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