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. ❤️🖖😎
Not the first time I’ve started with “wish I’d read/known this 40 years ago” when my college psych professor did biofeedback on me. I couldnt even sit still & relax in the chair for 5 minutes. Even I didn’t know I was that wired into “fight or flight” mode so intensely most of the time. I am not pretending to be calm, mindful or spiritually composed now after reading this. But i’m much closer than i was before. And smiling a lot & even enjoying a chuckle or 2.
I was just telling someone the other day about my biofeedback in college. My Psych professor was doing a study on migraines and biofeedback, and I had horrible migraines (mitigated in the end only by menopause). It was amazingly successful, and for me, just learning to meditate, it wasn't difficult. What it taught me was just how powerful our brains are over our body - a lesson I used for my migraines, and later for cancer. I don't hear a lot about it these days, which is a shame.
This a quiet revolution. Humor does it for me. When I can grasp perspective enough to look at myself and smile, “Dude. You’re feeling frantic again, aren’t you?” Instantly my center returns.
As one who is constantly running late in the morning, this definitely resonates. It was much (*much*) worse when I had to commute every morning on a highway that was nigh legendary for having at least one wrinkled up car between me and my destination. I'm not exactly patient in the best of circumstances, and trying to fit more into the pre-commute period of the day than was probably possible didn't help. I work from home full time now, but still have a fixed schedule. And still try to fit more in than I probably can do (though if I'm being completely candid, the not-wanting-to-dive-into-the-grind-again part makes this way too easy). But inevitably we hit the "oh [expletive] it's time to get to work" portion of the program, and I find that I'm not so much "aggressing" (because I'm the only one to "aggress" against) as "triaging":
This can wait,
That I can take with me to finish while the laptop boots up (which takes a stupid long time for some reason),
Skip this,
Park that,
Combine these,
Stick a pin in it,
Make a note...
but the same tension is there, it's just expressing itself differently. I'm not impotently yelling at the guy his front of me who's had his blinker on for 9 miles and can't hear me. But I *am* yelling at *me* (in my head) for -- once again -- letting the morning get away from me, and making a solemn oath (or a jovial oath on good days) to not do that tomorrow. A vow I can already tell you I'll break before the thought finishes forming. Because I've lived with me longer than anyone else in the world has, and I know all my secrets... or most of them anyway.
If i didn’t know better (and maybe i don’t ) I’d think i wrote what i just read….only 5 years ago. Newsflash (for me at least): you can get Long Covid (or pick any other chronic illness) & be forced to retire and STILL do all of the aforementioned above. Learning to pace myself is the impossible dream, one of the reasons I keep coming back to bed today. I love your “triaging”, James, & may just steal it from you as I’m more frustrated than I’d like over (not) managing my life’s “to do” list. You can be sick in bed & still rushing (seriously, WTF?) who knew? But ahhh, what VMB wrote feels so possibly a way to do things differently that feels better. I’m game. And mucho thanx for all you shared about your experiences 🖖
Not sure I'd *recommend* what I do to anyone. The triage just *replaces* the aggression. Or more accurately, turns it inward. This isn't the path to peace by any means. I'm still late, still stressed about it and still no closer to solving it than I was on the interstate. Yelling is yelling whether it's aloud or not. And I knew then -- as I do now -- that I was/am doing it. But we each find our own way, and if triaging helps you find yours, great!
I think the last I see of clarity in the morning is shortly after my feet hit the floor, and I'm still sitting on the side of the bed with our 22-pound Catzilla loudly meowing at me that he hasn't eaten in *days* and can I *pleasepleasepleaase feed him*? Breathe in, breathe out... "It's Monday. I'm lifting at the gym. No standup meeting this morning. No hockey tonight" (actually that will be at 0500 tomorrow morning, but I can serve as an example).
As soon as I stand up, It's On. Like Donkey Kong. Not exactly what (I think) VMB had in mind.
Well just know it was appreciated. & something I could relate to with both that “whew I’m not the only crazy one that thinks/does/act like that” and also a different unique approach to handling it, even if it didn’t help - one can plant seeds in another’s mind that grow into something entirely different & perhaps healing & helpful. You just never know. Oops substitute “I” for “you”.
Thank you for this. Truly. It’s a gift to encounter a piece that treats presence as something real and usable rather than decorative, especially when so much public writing right now oscillates between panic and performance. This lands in a register I care deeply about, when I’m not, as you note, dissecting an emergent fascist moment and its many disguises.
What you’re naming here matters precisely because it refuses the fantasy that spiritual life belongs only to calm conditions. You’re right. If presence only works when life is orderly, it’s not presence. It’s mood management. And moods don’t hold when pressure arrives. Being does.
I’m especially struck by the way you separate hurry from harm. That distinction feels essential. We’ve trained ourselves to believe that speed itself is the moral failure, when in fact the deeper loss is disappearance. The moment when attention collapses into outcome, when the future colonizes the present, and other people become obstacles rather than fellow travelers. That vanishing has become so normalized we barely register it anymore. We just call it necessity and move on.
What resonates for me, and what I’ve seen play out far beyond traffic and deadlines, is how quickly absence becomes a training ground for cruelty. Not dramatic cruelty. Small, procedural, ambient cruelty. The kind that leaks out sideways. A tone sharpens. A gesture hardens. A system becomes easier to justify. Presence interrupts that not by fixing anything, but by reintroducing the human into the moment before harm fully takes shape.
I also appreciate how cleanly you resist the temptation to turn presence into technique. That’s a trap I’ve watched consume a lot of well-meaning people. Tools become control strategies. Calm becomes performance. We end up trying to manage ourselves into acceptability rather than actually seeing what’s happening. And the irony is that the moment we stop trying to improve the experience and simply register it, something humane reenters the room.
That distinction between seeing and fixing feels especially important right now. We live in systems that reward urgency, efficiency, and compliance while quietly punishing awareness. Being present slows nothing down, but it does change the source from which action flows. Action sourced from unconsciousness always leaves residue. Action sourced from being rarely does. You can feel the difference afterward, even when the outcome looks the same on paper.
I can’t help but notice how scalable this insight is. Not as a program, but as an orientation. The same disappearance you describe in moments of hurry is what institutions rely on at scale. Systems function best when people are just absent enough from themselves to proceed without asking too many questions. Presence, even in brief pulses, restores a kind of internal legitimacy. It reminds us that necessity isn’t the same thing as truth, and speed isn’t the same thing as integrity.
What stays with me most is your insistence that presence works in flashes, not performances. That we don’t need to correct, justify, or narrate our way back into being. We only need to notice when we’ve left ourselves behind. That noticing is already an ethical act. It keeps us human inside the mess.
So thank you for writing something that doesn’t offer escape, but fidelity. In a moment when so much of public life rewards disappearance, that insistence feels quietly radical. And deeply necessary.
Yep - that was me when I had a car and was late or stressed. So when my car died and I could not afford to replace it, I thought - WOW gift from heaven to stop my distraction. Well not so much. It actually began to increase it as I was getting rides from multiple people with different driving skills and different interpretations of time. And I could control none of it. About 6 month into it, I finally started to work on de-stressing myself again. I realize it beginning and name it. Works till I forget again. Oh and I did stop using drivers that were really bad.
“God walks ‘slowly’ because He is love. If He is not love He would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk, and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.”
—Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God: Biblical Reflections (Orbis, 1979), pp. 6-7.
Thank you. I needed this. Between the guilt of keeping someone waiting, and the embarrassment and anger of
failure to meet a small goal of getting out the door on time; there’s these above mentioned reasons to stay kind to oneself. Thank you!! I’ll read this over and over until I am able to use it in practice.
A clear and humane contemplation. I was especially drawn to the reminder that presence is not a performance but a return. This is a true practice, one that does not ask life to slow down, only for "being" to re-enter it.
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. ❤️🖖😎
Not the first time I’ve started with “wish I’d read/known this 40 years ago” when my college psych professor did biofeedback on me. I couldnt even sit still & relax in the chair for 5 minutes. Even I didn’t know I was that wired into “fight or flight” mode so intensely most of the time. I am not pretending to be calm, mindful or spiritually composed now after reading this. But i’m much closer than i was before. And smiling a lot & even enjoying a chuckle or 2.
I was just telling someone the other day about my biofeedback in college. My Psych professor was doing a study on migraines and biofeedback, and I had horrible migraines (mitigated in the end only by menopause). It was amazingly successful, and for me, just learning to meditate, it wasn't difficult. What it taught me was just how powerful our brains are over our body - a lesson I used for my migraines, and later for cancer. I don't hear a lot about it these days, which is a shame.
This a quiet revolution. Humor does it for me. When I can grasp perspective enough to look at myself and smile, “Dude. You’re feeling frantic again, aren’t you?” Instantly my center returns.
As one who is constantly running late in the morning, this definitely resonates. It was much (*much*) worse when I had to commute every morning on a highway that was nigh legendary for having at least one wrinkled up car between me and my destination. I'm not exactly patient in the best of circumstances, and trying to fit more into the pre-commute period of the day than was probably possible didn't help. I work from home full time now, but still have a fixed schedule. And still try to fit more in than I probably can do (though if I'm being completely candid, the not-wanting-to-dive-into-the-grind-again part makes this way too easy). But inevitably we hit the "oh [expletive] it's time to get to work" portion of the program, and I find that I'm not so much "aggressing" (because I'm the only one to "aggress" against) as "triaging":
This can wait,
That I can take with me to finish while the laptop boots up (which takes a stupid long time for some reason),
Skip this,
Park that,
Combine these,
Stick a pin in it,
Make a note...
but the same tension is there, it's just expressing itself differently. I'm not impotently yelling at the guy his front of me who's had his blinker on for 9 miles and can't hear me. But I *am* yelling at *me* (in my head) for -- once again -- letting the morning get away from me, and making a solemn oath (or a jovial oath on good days) to not do that tomorrow. A vow I can already tell you I'll break before the thought finishes forming. Because I've lived with me longer than anyone else in the world has, and I know all my secrets... or most of them anyway.
If i didn’t know better (and maybe i don’t ) I’d think i wrote what i just read….only 5 years ago. Newsflash (for me at least): you can get Long Covid (or pick any other chronic illness) & be forced to retire and STILL do all of the aforementioned above. Learning to pace myself is the impossible dream, one of the reasons I keep coming back to bed today. I love your “triaging”, James, & may just steal it from you as I’m more frustrated than I’d like over (not) managing my life’s “to do” list. You can be sick in bed & still rushing (seriously, WTF?) who knew? But ahhh, what VMB wrote feels so possibly a way to do things differently that feels better. I’m game. And mucho thanx for all you shared about your experiences 🖖
Not sure I'd *recommend* what I do to anyone. The triage just *replaces* the aggression. Or more accurately, turns it inward. This isn't the path to peace by any means. I'm still late, still stressed about it and still no closer to solving it than I was on the interstate. Yelling is yelling whether it's aloud or not. And I knew then -- as I do now -- that I was/am doing it. But we each find our own way, and if triaging helps you find yours, great!
I think the last I see of clarity in the morning is shortly after my feet hit the floor, and I'm still sitting on the side of the bed with our 22-pound Catzilla loudly meowing at me that he hasn't eaten in *days* and can I *pleasepleasepleaase feed him*? Breathe in, breathe out... "It's Monday. I'm lifting at the gym. No standup meeting this morning. No hockey tonight" (actually that will be at 0500 tomorrow morning, but I can serve as an example).
As soon as I stand up, It's On. Like Donkey Kong. Not exactly what (I think) VMB had in mind.
Well just know it was appreciated. & something I could relate to with both that “whew I’m not the only crazy one that thinks/does/act like that” and also a different unique approach to handling it, even if it didn’t help - one can plant seeds in another’s mind that grow into something entirely different & perhaps healing & helpful. You just never know. Oops substitute “I” for “you”.
This is beautiful and practical and immediately applicable and relevant AF. Thank you!
Such a helpful reminder!
Thank you for this. Truly. It’s a gift to encounter a piece that treats presence as something real and usable rather than decorative, especially when so much public writing right now oscillates between panic and performance. This lands in a register I care deeply about, when I’m not, as you note, dissecting an emergent fascist moment and its many disguises.
What you’re naming here matters precisely because it refuses the fantasy that spiritual life belongs only to calm conditions. You’re right. If presence only works when life is orderly, it’s not presence. It’s mood management. And moods don’t hold when pressure arrives. Being does.
I’m especially struck by the way you separate hurry from harm. That distinction feels essential. We’ve trained ourselves to believe that speed itself is the moral failure, when in fact the deeper loss is disappearance. The moment when attention collapses into outcome, when the future colonizes the present, and other people become obstacles rather than fellow travelers. That vanishing has become so normalized we barely register it anymore. We just call it necessity and move on.
What resonates for me, and what I’ve seen play out far beyond traffic and deadlines, is how quickly absence becomes a training ground for cruelty. Not dramatic cruelty. Small, procedural, ambient cruelty. The kind that leaks out sideways. A tone sharpens. A gesture hardens. A system becomes easier to justify. Presence interrupts that not by fixing anything, but by reintroducing the human into the moment before harm fully takes shape.
I also appreciate how cleanly you resist the temptation to turn presence into technique. That’s a trap I’ve watched consume a lot of well-meaning people. Tools become control strategies. Calm becomes performance. We end up trying to manage ourselves into acceptability rather than actually seeing what’s happening. And the irony is that the moment we stop trying to improve the experience and simply register it, something humane reenters the room.
That distinction between seeing and fixing feels especially important right now. We live in systems that reward urgency, efficiency, and compliance while quietly punishing awareness. Being present slows nothing down, but it does change the source from which action flows. Action sourced from unconsciousness always leaves residue. Action sourced from being rarely does. You can feel the difference afterward, even when the outcome looks the same on paper.
I can’t help but notice how scalable this insight is. Not as a program, but as an orientation. The same disappearance you describe in moments of hurry is what institutions rely on at scale. Systems function best when people are just absent enough from themselves to proceed without asking too many questions. Presence, even in brief pulses, restores a kind of internal legitimacy. It reminds us that necessity isn’t the same thing as truth, and speed isn’t the same thing as integrity.
What stays with me most is your insistence that presence works in flashes, not performances. That we don’t need to correct, justify, or narrate our way back into being. We only need to notice when we’ve left ourselves behind. That noticing is already an ethical act. It keeps us human inside the mess.
So thank you for writing something that doesn’t offer escape, but fidelity. In a moment when so much of public life rewards disappearance, that insistence feels quietly radical. And deeply necessary.
Yep - that was me when I had a car and was late or stressed. So when my car died and I could not afford to replace it, I thought - WOW gift from heaven to stop my distraction. Well not so much. It actually began to increase it as I was getting rides from multiple people with different driving skills and different interpretations of time. And I could control none of it. About 6 month into it, I finally started to work on de-stressing myself again. I realize it beginning and name it. Works till I forget again. Oh and I did stop using drivers that were really bad.
A spiritual practice for real people with real lives. How refreshing!
“God walks ‘slowly’ because He is love. If He is not love He would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk, and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.”
—Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God: Biblical Reflections (Orbis, 1979), pp. 6-7.
Thank you. I needed this. Between the guilt of keeping someone waiting, and the embarrassment and anger of
failure to meet a small goal of getting out the door on time; there’s these above mentioned reasons to stay kind to oneself. Thank you!! I’ll read this over and over until I am able to use it in practice.
A clear and humane contemplation. I was especially drawn to the reminder that presence is not a performance but a return. This is a true practice, one that does not ask life to slow down, only for "being" to re-enter it.
Thank you 🙏