On Being Here
My book, Good Burdens, arrives in October 2021. I wanted to write something very different from my previous book, The Joy of Missing Out, but with the same values: something unapologetically philosophical, spiritual, and reflective, while ultimately packaging those ideas with actionable practices to put theory into action.
The term “good burdens” was expressed by a man whose thoughts have shaped my own outlook nearly as much as a flesh-and-blood mentor, the philosopher, and theologian Albert Borgmann. Borgmann describes good burdens as the commitments that bind us together as communities and families for the better- responsibilities we take on that enrich every aspect of our personal and collective well-being.
Following is a discussion of part 1 of chapter one of Good Burdens, “Be Here.”
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“Being here” means more than physical presence: it means being mindful, existing in the present moment, and slowing our internal pace to one that saves us from slipping out of the experience as we’re living it.
When I strive (or ask someone else) to “be here,” it’s easy to get bogged down in semantics and say that simply existing and occupying a given space qualifies.
To dip into existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness for a moment, existence is entirely a product of the presence of consciousness- no consciousness, no existence. (The unconscious of dreams, sleep, and the primal drone within our minds is not non-consciousness- it is simply a distant, hazier, more alien realm than the one we imagine to be our default.) He defines two legitimate states of being- being-in-itself, the neither active nor passive state of the objects that fill our universe, and being-for-itself, the fluid state of conscious entities like ourselves, where we “exist” to a greater or lesser degree by our consciousness and awareness.
There’s another half of being-for-itself that matters to us here: being-for-others: the extent to which our very existence as a “self” is inextricably wrapped up in our relational dynamics to others.
If every human you related to your whole life told you (or just treated you accordingly), “you are Christina Crook,” they are, to a nontrivial degree, making it so: we can’t, as both sentient and social beings, escape this. Likewise, we hold the same power over others: how we perceive and treat other humans shapes their identity.
We are made, in other words, from both the inside and the outside, and are in a constant process of remaking as long as we exist (and beyond- think of how our feelings and definition of those who have passed away or just pass from our experience, soften or harden as time goes by).
Wanting you to understand this is the foundation for my much more urgent admonition: be present, because you exist a little less as the unique individual you are when you are anything less than fully present in the moment.
This means building a few important practices into our lives: being mindful, living in the present moment, and adopting the proper pace to do those things, which nearly always means slowing our internal thoughts. They’re all related.
Being mindful is what the “mother of mindfulness,” psychologist Ellen Langer, defines as “if you’re going to do it, be there for it.” [ Listen to our conversation on the JOMO(cast) ] If you’re where you are at a given moment to have a conversation with a friend, complete an important piece of work, or reflect on the natural world around you, do those things and nothing else. To go back to Sartre, you’ve defined the moment in a specific way: the less you fit into that definition, the less you exist within it. The extraneous things- the distractions, the multitasking, the creep of your attention towards a phone or other device- are ephemeral and won’t contribute to your overall “you-ness” when the moment has passed.
Only the extent to which you existed in that moment will stay with you.
As much as possible- mindfulness is effort- recruit all your senses, attention, and thoughts towards the purpose of the moment. Are you talking to a friend? What is she wearing? What are your surroundings like, and how do they affect your conversation? What’s her tone of voice- and yours? How does each conversational beat affect the way you feel about your relationship with her?
If this sounds like a lot of things to juggle, it is- being fully present means attending to the whole experience. But the rewards are enormous- almost incalculable- including the strengthening of your muscles to do so more effortlessly. If you’ve never had 100% of a real conversation, it will blow your mind when you finally do.
Remaining in the present moment is a corollary to this because it’s generally distraction- the absence of mindfulness- that causes us to fail in this step. Langer has an adage for this part, too: just take care of right now. This doesn’t mean that we should live like goldfish, with no long-term memory or goals, flitting from moment to moment without awareness or concern for how they fit together into the broader narrative of our lives. What it means is that in the moment- once we’ve sat down to have the conversation, do the work, eat the meal, build the sandcastle- our engagement with that moment should be its value in the present.
You’ve probably heard of sand mandalas, the beautiful “paintings” created by Tibetan Buddhist monks that take hours or even days and weeks to create: complex, awesome, painstaking compositions of sand of a multitude of colors and textures. At the end of the creation of a mandala, after a deep viewing and reflection on the design, the mandala is ritualistically destroyed so that absolutely nothing of its form remains.
The mandala didn’t have value because it would exist forever, because nothing does. The doing and the seeing was the value. Nothing was lost. If you cook a great meal for your family, it might make you a better chef, it might make your family appreciate you more, it might make a nice Instagram artistically laid out on your table; those could all be true, but they aren’t the reason or purpose for doing it. The purpose is to do your best job on something important to you- if you were hit by a bus before ever again strengthening your culinary muscles or hearing rave reviews from your kids or likes on your feed, the moment of having cooked a great meal still happened, and can’t ever be taken out of the universe.
The last piece of this is what makes the previous two points possible: slowing down. Our thoughts move faster than our bodies- faster than most things in the universe, in fact. They certainly move faster than others can respond to them, and faster than the world can show us the results of the actions they motivate. When meditative traditions talk about striving for “stillness,” this is what they mean: aligning the speed of your thoughts with the moment. Not racing ahead of the moment into the future, or struggling to keep up as distractions slow them.
Not too much, not too little.
“Making time” doesn’t mean mastering sorcery or time travel: it means willfully choosing a schedule for our days and hours that allow each moment enough space within those days and hours to unfold naturally. How much time does eating a good meal really take? How much time does it take you to do a piece of your best work, with all your creativity and productivity being mindfully applied?
A good night’s sleep? A kiss? You get the idea.
Good burdens come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, each demanding- not a dirty word, in itself- a commitment of time, attention, and passion. But all of them assume we’ve already mastered the most principal of good burdens, or at least are on the way: First, just be here.
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Originally posted on my dedicated blog on Medium.com