Yesterday I read a post on the New York Times Happy Days blog about a topic that has been coming up repeatedly for me during the past couple of years. Presence. In this post, Norman Fischer writes about the importance of completely inhabiting the present moment and living life to its fullest.
This isn’t always easy.
There are so many roadblocks to opening up and enjoying the present moment, right? Horrific life or world events, worrying about things that may happen in the future, paralyzing fear that keeps us stuck in a situation we’d rather be out of, continuously replaying past events in our heads that we can’t do anything to change now, and random everyday annoyances, to name a few. But actually, if we take a closer look, there’s only one major roadblock – our brains.
Many times it’s hard to live outside of your mind. You get trapped in your thoughts. The goal is to be able to step back from repeatedly dwelling on the past and thinking the worst about the future as often as possible. To try to live and enjoy the life that you have right now. Not the life you’ll have as soon as you get a new job. Not the life you’ll have when you make more money. Not the life you’ll have once you have a baby. Not the life you’ll have when you’re in Paris three months from now. The imperfect life that you have today.
Not to be a downer, but tomorrow doesn’t always come. Impermanence is a fact, and sometimes we forget this. We go on lamenting our current situation and living for the future, thinking that everything will finally be better when we buy a bigger house, sell our first novel, or the stock market improves. We focus on the things that we don’t have and miss the biggest gift of all – the chance to have another day.
Sometimes it takes a rude awakening to understand the importance of presence. We get jolted into it by losing someone that we love, getting laid off, or becoming sick. We go through a period of grief, then our priorities begin to shift. We start to appreciate the good things in our lives and focus on those rather than what we’re missing. We start to define what’s important to us and take steps to live our lives accordingly.
Being present doesn’t have to take a life altering event. You can just decide that you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and embrace what life has to offer you. Yes, even if that means being stuck in traffic for half an hour with a broken iPhone and wearing your coffee to work. It doesn’t mean that you’re always going to like what you get or that you’re never going to worry or obsess again, but you can choose to live your life fully, engage, and take action as often as humanly possible instead of living inside your head and worrying about what’s been done or what’s to come.