What is the Price for Presence

We must pay— attention.

It seems like a relatively low cost of entry, right? Nominal really, that is, until you have to pay attention to the spiking anger that erupts from another person’s seeming stupidity or the piercing rejection of feeling invisible to someone you love or the muddy gunky goo of wishing you had what someone else has.

I have spent the past several days in California at an Eckhart Tolle conference called Living A Life of Presence. It has been filled with speakers from all walks of life: meditation gurus, quantum physicists, musicians, poets, non-denominational preachers and more.

There has been a dizzying constellation of opinions about what consciousness is, the power of now, the plane of possibility and where time intersects eternity. But one message remained consistent:

We must pay attention.

Because attention is love.

And love is a commodity we need more of in this world.

I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of love AND paying attention. I like to think I do both pretty often with our children, our dogs, flowers, friends in peril, even strangers who need a trifle of my time.

But I am not so generous with my self. Don’t get my wrong. I get pedicures regularly, eat healthy, get highlights when I need them and buy new running shoes when the cushion gets low.

I pay attention to the details in my life.

And if my husband needs my attention with anything pertaining to the details of his or our life, whether related to work, family, dreams, fears, joys or the ongoing grief of missing people who are no longer here, I am all in.

I am good at paying attention when it is about something.

Not so much when it is about no thing. It makes me wicked uncomfortable, which, given the world we live in, is not terribly surprising. Our culture teaches us that if we pay attention to no thing we will amount to nothing.

The message is clear.

Our worth is directly correlated to our productivity and accomplishments.

Otherwise, who are we?

I have been a lifetime subscriber to this way of thinking. As a child who didn’t really excel at anything externally I became committed (think a touch insane) to producing and accomplishing as much as I could.

But at forty-seven years old, here’s what I’m getting. Whether our mission is to solve poverty, make doughnuts, raise children or write poetry, what we do is imbued with the quality of our attention.

And the quality of our attention is dependent on our ability to stop accomplishing, producing, problem-solving— thinking.

We all want to be present.

For our families. Our life’s passion. Our work. Our friends. Our pets. Our coffee and croissant. Our parents. For everything in our life! But the real question is: Are we willing to be present for our selves?

Not just the self who worked out, put a love note in the kids’ lunchbox, wasn’t late for the train, turned down the ginger scone and landed a new piece of business.

But also for the self that isn’t sure if her life has real meaning, voluntarily scarfed down a Costco size bag of potato chips and freaked out at the kids for leaving their sports equipment all over the house, again.

My way of being present for self #2 is to figure out where I’ve messed up and figure out how I can do it differently. Make it better. Make a plan. I mean why be with the problem when you can solve it?

That’s great but it’s not being present.

It’s fixing the issue. Managing the effect.

Not dissolving the cause.

Presence is not about doing something to fix something else. That may be necessary. That may come later. But, it’s much harder than that.

It’s about being with whatever is. Being with what’s behind the behavior. And staying there for a seemingly intolerable amount of time, until, it kind of melts away. And it does.

Sometimes it feels like an exorbitantly high price to pay, especially for something as nebulous as presence.

Is presence really that great?

That transformational?

The answer is no, when I’m not doing it and yes, when I am.

Mostly I tell myself I don’t have time right now but I will totally be present later when I get this project done or finish helping the boys with their homework or go for a run. But the list never ends. And there is no later.

Luckily I have interventions with myself regularly.

And I make a right now— be with whatever is. When I do this, without exception, the pay-off is far greater than the price of entry. Often, after not more than even ten minutes of simply being.

Whatever thought or fear I have allowed myself to become consumed by, whatever irritation or grievance has overwhelmed me, whatever hurt has left me feeling worthless and paralyzed, dissipates.

The circumstances do not change, of course.

But my relationship to them does. I am no longer a slave to the crushing neediness of them. I am no longer bound by what I think they mean, what I feel they will do to me. I am free.