“The more you surrender yourself to any particular moment the more compelling and engaging discoveries you will find there.”
Where do you spend most of your time? By that I do not mean your geo-location. The “where” I am referring to is really a time oriented question. So, if I were to be completely accurate my question would be a little weird. The more accurate way to ask question is – When do you spend most of your time? No, I am not referring to time travel here. What I am talking about is mind travel.
We have an amazing capacity to wander away from the present to meander though other moments, moments of past, moments of future, moments of not now. My brain, if left to its own devices, prefers attention deficit. It takes next to nothing to draw me away from the present to visit my historical replays, ruminations about how it should have been, comparisons of those experiences with the current one, or fantasies about what is to be. In that way I have missed much of my life even as the experience played out before me.
The past and future are phantoms, intangible specters without substance or juice. I, and most people I have talked to, have only found that juice when completely in the current moment. Then why do we spend so little time there? We so easily flee the moment because we do not always like what that moment has to offer. Frankly, being present can be incredibly uncomfortable. It is an act of uncontrolled exposure. We can regulate and buffer our cognitive past and future considerations. However, when focused on the now we receive an unfiltered, unabridged, unedited version of “present” that assaults all of our available senses and emotions. While we all love the bliss and joy that accompanies some of our life’s moments, more often than not we are exposed to experiences that are painful, boring, embarrassing, distasteful, scary, and too darned vulnerable. So, escaping the present is an instinctual self defense. Another, more tricky reason for escape is that you are afraid to be crushed by the loss of the moment. Anyone who has been afraid to completely let themselves fall in love for fear of future pain have struggled with that concern. Yet, with so much at stake in terms of our satisfaction it is wise to learn how to circumvent those instincts and sink into the experience.
To explore intentional presence I think that it might be valuable to look at some circumstances for which not being present would be either not possible or a very bad idea. If you have ever skied down a mogul run, competed in a formal debate, solved a partial differential equation, fought in a full contact martial arts exhibition, or performed a dance number in front of an audience you know that slipping away from the current moment can incur anything between undesirable and horrific results. These are examples of moments for which acute presence is required. The more extreme the situation, the higher the demand for that targeted focus. Fighter piloting, race car driving, military combat, Olympic competition all require rapt, unflagging attention. In essence, it requires falling in love with each instant to prevail. Then you must let that instant go to free you up to fall in love with the incoming instant. From my experience loving those instances causes them to expand taking on color, depth and texture that I would not have noticed otherwise.
How do we translate that compulsory focus into less demanding times? The obvious thing to do is to fall in love with all moments. That is to relax into each moment and completely accept it for what it is. I call that developing a profound relationship with that which is. Noting the moment for all that it brings to you objectively, without judgment for the circumstance or your emotions, resisting nothing regardless of your instinct to do so.
Several years ago I underwent a series of electrolysis treatments to remove unwanted hair. During each session the electrologist would insert an electrode needle down the targeted hair follicle to its root. She would then apply a charge which would simultaneously electrocute the root and boil the liquid around the root. She would repeat this hundreds of times during each session. It was an extremely uncomfortable procedure to say the least. Initially, I tried Novocain injections prior to the electrolysis session but the numbing would wear off mid-session leaving me with all the after effects of Novocain – flabby, swollen face, tingling and redness, plus the electrolysis pain. Then I tried topical anesthetic but I could still feel the electrolysis under the surface. Additionally, regardless of numbing technique, the treated area was left blistered, red, and swollen for days. After listening to a speaker talk about his experience with non-anaesthetized surgery I decided to “get present” during my sessions. For my next appointment I declined local anesthetic. Rather, as the electrologist prepared for the session I performed a set of deep breathing exercises that relaxed me into a semi meditative state. When she inserted the needle into the first follicle I focused all of my attention at the needle point and maintained my rapt attention at that point throughout the charge. As I felt pain I would focus tightly on that point. After the first few charges an odd thing occurred. The pain went away. As long as I maintained focus it did not hurt. The moment I lost focus the pain was extraordinary. So, focus I did. Within a few minutes of starting the procedure I became so relaxed that I nearly fell asleep. When I finished the session I looked in the mirror. There was only a mild redness across my skin. I was free of blistering and swelling.
I learned from that session that there is a magical relationship between the attention that I give to a moment and the positive experience I have of it. If painful experiences can be made peaceful by staying in the moment, what about the tedious, boring ones? In Dan Millman’s book “Way of the Peaceful Warrior,” Socrates, the protagonist’s guru encapsulated the point by saying, “Pay attention. There is NEVER nothing going on.” The more you surrender yourself to any particular moment the more compelling and engaging discoveries you will find there.
What do you gain by leading in the moment? Of the two generalized personality types – A: driven, ambitious, achievement oriented, impatient; and B: accommodating, cooperative, life quality oriented; I am a recovering type A+. Type As have a strong leaning towards objectives and therefore the future. It is easy, when your living in the “should be” future world of bringing ambitious plans to fruition, to miss the important happenings/circumstance in the present that may not be readily noticeable now but will significantly impact the outcome you seek to achieve. The big lesson that I have taken away from past few years serving in a change management executive role is that unless you thoroughly understand where individuals, organizations, culture stands today, you cannot effectively lead them to where you need them to be in the future. Developing a crystallized understanding of current state allows you to create realistic, practical, collaborative and compassionate plans for facilitating the human changes necessary to support your organizational goals.
While I tend to make these leadership and satisfaction concepts dense and complex, Zen masters are spare and elegant in articulating them. To that end I want to leave you with a quote one such master that sums up the entire point of this article. For that heavy lifting I will turn to Master Oogway of Kung Fu Panda fame. When Po the martial arts student struggled with whether or not to continue training Oogway counseled, “You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the ‘present.’”
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