The Trouble With Being Present

We are constantly being told to be present these days. Put down the phone, notice the moment, savor the time with your children. Pay attention, because it all goes so fast. The advice is so ubiquitous that failure to do so sounds like a moral failing.

But what if it’s not? What if we look away because sometimes looking directly at what we love can painful? Not because we don’t value it, but because we do? Presence has a cost. When you are completely present in a beautiful moment, you are not experiencing only the beauty, you are also acutely conscious of its impermanence.

When my daughter was thirteen months old, I was sitting on the floor of the living room on a Saturday afternoon. She was just learning to climb. Clad in a t-shirt and a diaper, she was intent on hoisting her tiny body onto the sofa. It was fascinating to watch her brain and body learning to move purposefully. I called my husband room to come and watch as she lifted one chubby little leg, repositioned herself, and then figured out how to get the rest of her body up too. We both watched, transfixed, as she figured it out, and then turned to us, triumphant. We cheered and she reveled. My heart felt like it would burst. A completely ordinary moment felt absolutely extraordinary. I remember saying afterward that if I had died at that very moment, I would have died a happy person.

I felt similarly a few years later, when, at a family wedding, my then four-year-old was serving as the flower girl. I turned from a casual conversation at the reception to see her, in her little white dress, dancing with her dad. The sight brought me to tears.

Decades later these memories are still so vivid. I looked directly at them, was fully present, and had felt the beauty of the moment right along with its fragility.

Full presence can be almost unbearably bright. Maybe it isn’t that we’re bad at presence, but that distraction protects us. Maybe we just instinctively regulate it, like using a dimmer switch. Or sunglasses. If we turn down the brightness — with errands, with phones, or with schedules — it might just help us stay in the room. Not because what is happening doesn’t matter, but because it does.

The cruel reversal, though, is that when the moment is gone, we wish we had looked directly into the light. We look at old pictures of holidays when everyone was still around the table and wish for that time again. The moments we ache for later are often the ones that seemed completely ordinary while we were inside them.

Sensory memories can bring this awareness into sharp relief.

These days I live only a few miles from the street I grew up on, so the seasons feel the same as they did when I was a kid. Autumn has the same crisp feel; the earth and flowers in the Spring have the same scent I remember. The birdsong is familiar to my ears. Everything is the same, yet these days, nothing is the same. Many of the people who graced my life are gone now. The stage is the same, but the cast has changed. And the natural inclination would be to say, Why didn’t I look longer? Savor more moments? Appreciate what I had?

But maybe I did. Maybe we all did.

Maybe human beings are not bad at presence. We just can’t live every ordinary Tuesday with full awareness that everyone and everything we love is temporary. That would make ordinary life impossible. But from time to time, maybe we can bear just a little more brightness. Not perpetual mindfulness; but the willingness, every so often, to not turn the dimmer switch quite so far down.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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Photo credit:  lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash