“Being present demands all of us. It’s not nothing. It may be the hardest thing in the world.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 25)
Beyond the Quote (138/365)
If you’ve ever tried to meditate, then you know how hard it is to be completely present for even a moment of time. Our brains are like monkeys diagnosed with ADD who just drank Red Bulls after taking a long nap—they’re out of control. We’re constantly wandering to different trains of thought, replaying past situations, simulating future situations, and thinking about seemingly random and arbitrary things like monkeys and Red Bull and squirrels.
If you haven’t ever tried meditating, try this exercise real quick. Get comfortable in your chair, close your eyes, and just try focusing on your breathing for a few minutes. Notice how quickly your mind deviates from your breath and starts thinking about something else. It’s almost instantaneous. I would be impressed if you could make it past 10 seconds without having a wandering thought. Seriously, try it.
This isn’t even taking into consideration all of the distractions that surround us. Trying to meditate or focus on being present in a quiet, controlled environment is one thing. Trying to do it when you have constant notifications popping up on your phone, advertisements from your nearby screens trying to reel you in, and a ton of chatter and commotion around you—changes the thing completely. And this is the challenge that most of us are up against.
Trying to be present is hard enough. Trying to be present in a world of distractions makes it harder. Trying to be present when we’re not even trying, makes it the hardest. The reason many of us are only making it harder for ourselves is because we’re living our lives reactively rather than responsibly. We wake up and have a blurry vision of what we want to accomplish for the day and rather than respond to what comes up proactively (and take responsibility), we react because we’re never mentally where we need to be—not really at least.
We wake up in the morning and check our phones for what happened while we were asleep. We move from one task to whatever task “feels right” while trying to remember all that we have to do throughout the day. We sit down to do one task and we think about the next. We get to that next task and think about the task we just left. We try to get important work done but we end up checking our phones again. We put our phones down and then think about what we just read on one of our timelines. We look outside and think about how the weather was better on a past day. We project ourselves into the future and imagine a day when we’ll have that kind of beautiful weather again. We turn on the TV and escape from the reality of thinking at all and just veg out.
Being present is not nothing—it demands ALL of you. Don’t trust that you can just be present without trying—our minds don’t work like that. It takes careful planning, deliberate effort, and keen self-awareness.
Why careful planning? Because when you can properly organize your time and priorities, you can free your mind from the toils of the past and the anxieties of the future. Planning provides comfort in the choices you make (because you previously thought about them and decided on the best ones) and allows you to disconnect from the worry of uncertainty in your mind.
Why deliberate effort? Because as we saw above, our minds are out of control. We need to constantly remind ourselves to come back to the present moment—our breath—and re-focus on the here and now. Not the back-then and later. Without deliberate effort, our minds will do whatever they want—and being present just isn’t something they want. Why? Because when you’re present your mind ceases to exist. It’s gone. It’s just your senses and the world around you. And while this is one of the most blissful states, it’s also the state where the mind dies—and it doesn’t want that. It want’s to stay alive and wild and chaotic.
Why keen self-awareness? Because, at least in my experience, we rarely ever realize we’re not present. That’s why it’s said that you get “lost” in trains of thought. You’re not self-aware—you’re somewhere else. You have to train your brain to become a “watcher” of your thoughts rather than the subject of them. When you can witness your thoughts, you can direct them. But when you ARE the thoughts, you’re lost in them.
This is all to say that this moment is all we have. If you take it for granted, you might miss it—and you’ll never get it back. Get better at being present and you’ll get better. In every single way that I can think of. Good luck.
This post became the introduction for: 32 Deep and Insightful Eckhart Tolle Quotes from The Power of Now
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