So, if you’re like me, you spend much of your creative life imagining extraordinary futures: a life filled with perfect amounts of motivational eustress, tons of funny, compassionate, witty, caring friends, all the natural opiates in body and brain firing and filling you with endorphin ecstasy 24-7, and not a worry in the world about money, health, sex or death. In other words … The Great Life, or at least A Good Day as advocated by Brother David Stendl-Rast!
While such creative imaginings feel better than being filled with fear and dread about a hapless future, or opining about regretful events littering my past, one central challenge in either of those creative fantasies is that I’m often actually missing the life unfolding before me moment by moment, right here, right now. Is a life not lived fully in the moment actually lived in reality at all?
1-10 Equals Now
For research purposes, developmental psychiatrist Daniel Stern has identified life in the present moment as the interval comprising 1-10 seconds of the here and now. That’s actually a long time – more than enough time for Wild Mind to go wandering. What seems to be one requirement for attending powerfully to the present moment however, is a robust neural organization requiring less and less energy and effort to deploy. That organization and “strength of mind“ can come about through any variety of means. One possibility: be born optimally neurally developed out of the womb and be lucky enough to traverse childhood with parents who practice attachment parenting and end up at age 25 relatively unscathed (think Christ or Buddha); another possibility: engage in years and years of rigorous, disciplined contemplative or spiritual practice. Both seem to have neural correlates to strength of mind.
But there are many, many ways to organize, expand, integrate and strengthen the neural connections in the brain. And many more yet to be discovered and implemented. Intensive, interactive video-game play might turn out to be one of them. Perhaps Spider Solitaire another. One more example that comes to mind is an anecdote that I remember reading about the Dalai Lama once stopping his driver outside a small town in Alabama in order to pay an impromptu visit with an elderly woman sitting and rocking on her front porch knitting. After visiting with her for twenty minutes or so, he came back to the car and announced, “She has achieved a level of depth, awareness and spiritual maturity by sitting on her porch and rocking and knitting, that many of the monks in my center in India rarely achieve.” Similar maturity seems to often be the fate of quilters as well.
Writing Down the Brainz
Another method I feel particularly drawn to is the one developed by Natalie Goldberg with her zen teacher’s blessing after she confessed to him that she couldn’t sit still in formal meditation for beano. He asked her what she loved to do. She replied, “I like to write.” “Then make that your practice,” Katagiri Roshi instructed her. So that’s a very useful guideline: take something we love doing and do it for the pure joy of it, and make it our disciplined, contemplative practice.
Living fully in the present moment, however, doesn’t necessarily get a lot of support from friends and/or family (although children can often behave in ways that rivet our immediate attention!). When I’m not in their flesh and blood presence, friends and family can sometimes take it personally that I’m not thinking loving thoughts about them, say, while I’m out chain-sawing up alder rounds, or trying desperately to not drive the wrong way down any one of Seattle’s many one-way streets. Such narrowly focused, present-moment attention can frequently get translated as “not caring” (a problem that only seems to get worse with age and diminishing attentional capacities). It rarely occurs to family and friends however, that when they’re busy thinking such thoughts about me and my imagined lack of care for them, they are often missing the me that is loving and caring and standing right in front of them. That disconnect can sometimes be good for a bit of in-the-moment spirited exchange.
Fearing and Dreading Fear and Dread
Fear and dread can also operate as powerful pulls away from the present moment. Basic fear and dread as Ernest Becker and many theologians have discerned all have threads that tie them back to death anxiety at their root. It’s also part of the essential structure of brain organization – we pay much greater attention to, and tend to instantly recall things that have the potential to turn the present moment into our last moment. The irony is that for many people for whom death is an imminent or impending reality, much of those last moments of life are lived in the present like they never had been before. Thus Dumbledore’s observation – “to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure” – might serve as an early-warning, life-guiding alert: work the best we can to relax and strengthen the ability to be where we are, how we are, when we are. Death will simply be for us whatever it turns out to be.
Hi Mark,
thanks once more for something that gets us all thinking about the important things in life.
I think probably Katagiri Roshi said a quite a bit more than your quote – of course.
Zen practice – and Buddhist practice generally – in my understanding, is more about being fully present to every moment, not only those moments that you enjoy. Indeed it is the growing ability to sit with all of ourselves, the juicy mix of the wonderful, the ordinary, and the horrible, and especially the horrible, and to accept it all in each moment, rather than picking and choosing, that brings deep fulfillment. Its about practicing to sit in, and with, especially the difficult emotions without suppression or expression, and experience it all come and go without feeling so pushed and pulled in all directions – detoxing from the addiction to “I want – I dont want” as Pema Chodron puts it.
As we do this we become more confident that we can experience, tolerate, and accept all of our feelings, and we let ourselves feel the full catastrophe, without resistance, then watch it pass so we are fresh in the next moment, increasingly free of the baggage,triggers and associations of the past.
It is a bit of an ideal maybe, but one worth moving towards.
thanks again, Steve, Melbourne, Australia
From Caitlyn James …
Hi Mark,
Posting on your blog suddenly got weird. Instead of posting as I always have it wants me to log in with my wordpress account – which I no longer use, or twitter, or facebook. I don’t want wordpress app to access all my facebook stuff so here is my comment. You can post it or just have it, as you wish….
Hi Mark,
As always, something to activate my brainwaves.
I got myself in trouble last week by challenging a friend who was expounding on the virtues of clearing the mind and sitting and meditating. This same friend was also confessing to how impossible it was for her and also how stressed she is feeling in her life.
I said something to the effect that all this mind-clearing, sitting still, living in the present moment is horse shit. If you are doing something that consumes your attention you will be in the present – she is a photographer and painter and can lose herself in those passions.
Trying to clear your mind is a lot of effort for very little payback. For some people it is their passion and they should meditate – and their payback is large and meaningful. For many it is a struggle that feeds feelings of frustration and inadequacy. For others, like myself, it feels like a waste of time when I could be walking my dogs in a forest or dancing. Both produce inner calm and moments of joy and most certainly strengthen a lot of desirable neural pathways. There are a lot of paths to nirvana.
Hopefully, my friend will forgive my bluntness. Hopefully, she will be more gentle with herself and allow her passions to guide her experience of the present and provide her with contemplation.
Me? Off for a couple of games of Sudoku before bed…. (A great way to focus the left brain so my right brain can “perfink”.)
—
🙂 Caitlyn
~ http://ImaginingBetter.com
Thanks, Mark. This line is tremendously helpful for me today,
“So that’s a very useful guideline: take something we love doing and do it for the pure joy of it, and make it our disciplined, contemplative practice.”
Cate
Getting to this a bit later than usual, owing to a rather present day (actually I read the first paragraph, which set the tone, this morning, and now I circle back to say thanks and namaste)
Thanks Mark, a really profoud read. I am reminded of Don Juans advice (in the Carlos Casteneda books) to live with “death as your advisor”… a very useful posture to take in life indeed. Some think this negative or morbid, but its quite the opposite! The reality is for us all that we are all on the road to death… and when we can really accept this, accept our mortality, feel into that… I think our lives become much richer. You are so right, that for most of those who are dying of a terminal illness, the capacity to be present to life is enhanced hugely. It’s what I wish for us all. To truly live the life we inhabit.
Warm thoughts
Hilary in NZ
Hi Mark,
I don’t know who you are, or how I am so blessed to receive your weekly thought/prayer/musings, but I feel very grateful. Thank you so much.
Jeanette
Beautiful…. getting good in your old age… blessings to you both
neena
Hi Mark,
An enjoyable Sunday morning read…I am re-minded that death is but one of the many ways we can lose our lives. It makes me think about regret and mindfulness or memory and mindfulness. My Mom died a few months ago from late stage Alzheimer’s and so I wonder a lot these days about now to keep the mind from wandering.
As always, thanks for getting up early and sending out your thoughts.
Diane