Why We Aren’t Present in Our Lives
“When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety..." - Rumi
Because life is so absurd we can’t take it all in. That’s why. Who could. There’s the constant barrage of breaking news, social media, life maintenance, the cost of everything, and the fact that our planet teeters on the brink of being too hot and too toxic to sustain human life. For most of us, these are just the backdrop to life. We also have full time work (if we’re lucky), kids to raise, and sometimes parents to care for at the same time. As a result, we find ourselves over-caffeinated just to get through the day or half-drunk from chasing some kind of comfort from it all.
I am a Rumi fan, some of you know. This is one of my favorites: “When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.” Rumi’s way of saying, be here now. Find stillness in the present moment. Where, at least in theory, everything already exists.
Most of us can find some comfort in his words. But practicing them, that’s something different, isn’t it. Especially in our smart phone-driven world. Everything, all the time, right at our fingertips. There’s really no need to ever have to sit still with just our thoughts, our breath. And why would we want to. Because whenever we find ourselves with blank space, we feel kind of panicky, don’t we. It is uncomfortable.
To begin with, there’s no dopamine in stillness. And we’ve grown pretty accustomed to that. Life without dopamine can feel a little like cardboard. But also, there’s a lot of things that occur to us in that space of stillness that we’d really rather not think about. The same kinds of random things that occur to us at 3 am and won’t let us go back to sleep. Everything from climate crisis to something someone said to us in 6th grade.
Again, this begs the question of why we would ever want to be present. Especially because as soon as we have a moment in between all our daily tasks, we can always just disappear into our phones or binge a TV series or eat gummies. I think a lot of people do all of these at the same time.
The best reason I can come up with to be in the present moment, given all the reasons why not, is because the here and now is the only place joy can be found. And joy, I think, is kind of the point. But that isn’t the end of this conversation. If joy were all there was in the present moment, more people would probably spend more time there. Other things live there, though, like sadness. And for most people, sadness is to be avoided at all costs.
And you can say that sadness is living in the past -- through regret or loss, or in the future, through the disappearance of an imagined life circumstance – but we can be sad for what is actually present, just like we can be sad for what isn’t. Whatever Tolle says, the here and now can still be disappointing.
You can be sad because you are not holding someone’s hand right now. You can be sad because your dog is not here to lay on your lap. You can be sad because you did not get the job or award or promotion that you wanted more than anything, and right now you are having to work somewhere or do something you don’t really like.
That is why so many of us are not present so much of the time. And while I appreciate Tolle and Rumi and everyone else who have told us these things, the things they are telling us about being present are not everything. Yes, it is an incredibly important tool to learn to be present and to be really aware more of the time. Yes, joy only exists in the here and now. Yes, developing the muscle to be present with everything that is, joy and sadness, is incredibly important. Especially because being present with joy is kind of magic, in that it makes it easier to find more joy. And I completely understand why you are willingly distracted.
Still, maybe think about being here just ten percent more every day. Maybe that is the beginning of the answer. Make it an experiment. Just ten percent more. A year from now, maybe twenty. And see what happens. Record it if you want. But definitely try to pay attention to what happens, to how you feel, to if the overall quality of your life gets better.