This essay grows out of the same soil as the reflections I’ve been writing alongside Cynthia Bourgeault’s course Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, particularly the material gathered around The Power of Being chapter in Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski. The ideas here are not theoretical. They emerged the way most honest spiritual insights do, not from quiet monasteries or carefully scheduled prayer times, but from friction. From hurry. From a sharp exchange about rushing that exposed how quickly we abandon our humanity and call it necessity.
What follows is not advice for becoming a serene saint behind the wheel, nor a call to perform mindfulness theater while the clock is screaming. It’s an exploration of how presence actually functions when things are already unraveling.
Because if a spiritual teaching only works when life is calm, it’s not a teaching. It’s a luxury.
The Moment Hurry Takes Over
Running late is one of the clearest laboratories for watching the false self seize command. The body tightens. The breath shortens. Attention narrows to a single outcome. Time becomes an enemy. Other people transform into obstacles. The inner narration sharpens into a low-grade aggression that disguises itself as efficiency.
Nothing overtly dramatic is happening, yet something essential quietly vanishes.
You’re no longer here.
And that disappearance is so normalized that we barely notice it. We say things like “I didn’t have time to be present,” as if presence were an optional add-on instead of the ground of being itself.
But the problem is not the rushing.
The problem is the loss of being while rushing.
Presence Is Not the Opposite of Speed
One of the most persistent spiritual myths is that presence requires slowness. That to be grounded, awake, or spiritually aligned, life must move at a monk’s pace. This assumption quietly disqualifies half of real life from spiritual relevance.
Presence does not require a change of speed.
It requires a change of center.
You can move quickly and remain rooted.
You can move slowly and be completely gone.
Speed is not the enemy. Unconsciousness is.
The inner tradition has always made this distinction. Presence is not a mood. It is not calmness. It is not a pleasant feeling state. Presence is the simple, radical capacity to see what is happening while it is happening without collapsing into it and without trying to fix it.
Seeing Instead of Fixing
When you’re running late, the practice is not to stop running late.
The practice is to notice what running late does to your sense of self.
Watch how identity contracts.
Watch how attention tunnels.
Watch how the future colonizes the present.
Watch how the body braces as if time itself were a predator.
That seeing alone is already a return to being.
This is where many people get stuck. They assume presence means replacing chaos with peace. But peace is not something you impose on chaos. Peace is what happens when chaos is fully seen without resistance.
Seeing is instantaneous.
Mindfulness unfolds in time.
Presence flashes. It does not require rehearsal.
You Don’t Need Better Techniques
In moments of hurry, people often reach for tools. Breathwork. Mantras. Self-talk. Techniques designed to calm the system back down. There is nothing wrong with these practices, but they are often misused as control strategies.
Presence is not achieved by managing yourself into a better state.
You don’t need to breathe differently.
You don’t need to narrate your experience.
You don’t need to perform calm.
You simply need to register, cleanly and without judgment, “This is hurry.”
Not “I am bad for hurrying.”
Not “I should be calmer.”
Not “This isn’t spiritual.”
Just: this is hurry.
The moment you see it, something subtle shifts. You may still be late. You may still move quickly. But the cruelty drains out of the motion. You stop leaking aggression into the world. You stop recruiting imaginary enemies.
You become human again inside the mess.
The Quiet Anguish That Opens the Door
There is a particular kind of inner ache that appears when you know there is a better way to be, but you don’t have time to access it. Most people either numb this discomfort or spiritualize it away.
But that ache is not a failure.
It is awareness knocking.
It is the friction between how you are moving and what you know to be true. The practice is not to eliminate that tension, but to let it be felt without commentary.
This is where transformation actually begins.
Not by fixing the conditions.
Not by correcting the behavior.
But by allowing being to touch the moment as it is.
Action That Is Not Violent
Action sourced from being has a different texture. It is precise without being frantic. Focused without being brittle. It moves quickly without trampling everything it touches.
Action sourced from unconsciousness always carries collateral damage, even when it “works.” You can feel the difference afterward. One leaves residue. The other does not.
Presence doesn’t make life slower.
It makes life less brutal.
Staying Human in the Middle of It
You don’t have to fix your hurry.
You don’t have to justify it.
You don’t have to turn it into a lesson.
Just see it.
Let awareness widen for a fraction of a second. Let being brush up against the moment. That is enough. Presence works in pulses, not performances.
The irony is that when you stop trying to be mindful and allow yourself to be present, something humane reenters the scene. You may still arrive late, but you arrive intact.
And that matters more than we’ve been taught to believe.
The practice is simple, but not easy.
Catch yourself in the act of losing yourself.
See it.
Don’t correct it.
Don’t dramatize it.
Presence does not slow the world down.
It gives you back to it.
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I cannot read these words you wrote enough times, and I thank you:
Presence does not require a change of speed.
It requires a change of center.
You can move quickly and remain rooted.
You can move slowly and be completely gone.
Speed is not the enemy. Unconsciousness is.
Twice now, in the backwaters of my mind, I've had the question float up to the surface of those muddy waters asking "What is presence?" Immediately I want to search, read, study, investigate. AND THEN . . . First on Facebook, a friend posts something simple, clear & concise that answers. The 2nd time, HERE & NOW, with this post of yours . . . again the question is answered. And the Flow is present. ❤️🖖😎