What does it mean to be present?
To be present means to be fully engaged with the current moment. It involves being able to focus your attention on what’s around you and engage with your current experience, without being distracted by thoughts about the past or worries about the future.
When you are in the moment, you are fully aware of your surroundings, your thoughts, and your emotions, and you are able to respond to them in a calm and mindful way. This can help you to feel more connected to your own experience, as well as to the people and the world around you.
Why you should care
When we spend the entire day ruminating on our past, and worrying about the future, we find ourselves with little time to take pleasure in what we have, be grateful for what we have, and enjoy the experiences we’re going through throughout the day. When we’re distracted by the past, we have less patience and energy to pause and evaluate a situation before reacting.
Not being present takes us out of the current moment and places us in our past or our unknown future.
While the moments slip by us, it’s harder to cement memories of what we’re going through because we’re not really paying attention.
On your deathbed, are you going to reflect on moments of beauty and joy and success and comfort, or will you ruminate on the things you wish you had done?
How to practice being more present
Being in the moment is often associated with mindfulness practices. Here are a few ways to practice being present daily:
Reread your Vision. It’s there to help remove distractions, help you feel confident that you’re on the right path, and allow you to worry less about choices and outcomes. It’s an enormous weight off your shoulders that allow you to fully be in the moment for, and relish, the vacations you’ve earned, the rewards you give yourself, and the gifts you give others.
When you find yourself ruminating or worrying about your to-do list, stop and look around you. Be aware of your surroundings in an observational, non-judgmental way.
Use meditation, deep breathing, or simply focus your attention on the sensations in your body or the sounds in your environment.
If you’re in a group, practice observing while you listen. Listen to your friends’ laughter, look them in the eyes, and validate what you’re hearing.
Laugh, a lot.
Get through the inertia of avoiding old friends by just picking up the phone and calling before you can think about it. just do it goes a long way toward getting you up and out.
Take pictures. And sometimes, don’t. Take a mental picture, even make the clicking noise in your mind, and imagine yourself wrapping up the image and placing it in your heart.
Write notes. Birthday notes, get well soon’s, thank you cards. Keep in touch.
Accept the things you cannot change, and do the work to try to process events so you can let go. When you ruminate, catch yourself, take a deep breath, look around you and ground yourself again in the moment. You are here, worthy, enough, and successful. And you deserve to enjoy your life right now, today.
Overall, being in the moment can help you to feel more present, grounded, and centered, and can improve your overall well-being and quality of life.
Did smartphones “ruin” being present?
With smartphones, we’re very rarely just BEING.
Taking a walk? Podcast on. Washing the dishes? Audible.
Exercising via an app. Waiting in line at the grocery store? Checking email. Waiting for your Lyft or the bus or whatever? Playing candy crush, doing Duolingo, scrolling on social media, or doom-scrolling the news.
Or, my personal favorite, googling ‘unlikely animal friends” and looking at all the pictures and reading the anecdotes about tigers and piglets being best friends.
Observation replaced with time-filling mental fidgeting
Before smartphones, a lot of the time when we were waiting in lines, exercising, or doing chores, we would be daydreaming.
When was the last time you daydreamed? I had a chance to last night.
I was over at a friends’ house coworking, and we planned to wrap up at about 4:30. I was done and packed up, and came into her home office but it turned out she needed about 20 more minutes before she would be done.
But she was happy to have the company, and so I hung out on the super comfy couch in her office.
My automatic first move?
Phone in hands, googling “unlikely animal friends”, of course!
A few minutes in, and after the 10th baby pig with duckling/puppy/kitten, I challenged myself (and TRUST ME, it was a challenge to not just keep mindlessly looking at geese nuzzling baby deer!) to put my phone down and just BE.
Just look out the window. Just let my mind wander.
Look, not just see but really LOOK at the art on her walls. Notice the texture of the couch. Stare up at the ceiling. Notice the leaves on the trees and the wind blowing them in the evening as the sky turned colors.
When I was growing up, I used to stare out the window for hours on our family trips to northern Michigan for family camp, but now it’s something I have to work at and consciously do, to rebuild that muscle of “just being.”
The great part is that the more I practice it, the easier it becomes to put the phone down, to pause the mental to-do list, and be here now.