No Time to Be Present
Checking your phone? Is your calendar up to date? What time is it? Where do you need to be? Is this how you start every day? If so, you are not alone as we are all so connected to doing, we have no time for being.
Today, we are more connected than ever and expectations are high for us to respond, be somewhere, do something, buy something, or engage on the internet from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep.
We have apps to helps us wake up, apps to remind us to take the children to some event, apps to connect us when we cannot be in-person (current COVID-19 pandemic), apps to track everything we do, and apps to make sure our bank accounts have money for everything we need to accomplish. There are even apps to track the apps.
All of these activities drive us into the future at a blazing pace. We reflect on the past to look at what we accomplished, checked off, or at that photo on our phone to remind us of where we were. How to we find time to be present? There is an app for that of course.
The easy answers are to put the phone down, turn off the alarm, close the apps, forget the daily chores, or not worry about what will be or what was. Sooner more than later, this will catch up to us and then we will have the opposite effect, we will be overwhelmed by all that we put off. This will create anxiety, frustration, anger, and a wide variety of emotions which in turn will lead us to find ways to block these emotions: another app, another cocktail, another pill, or some other form of distracting the mind from the reality of the mountain of “doing.”
How then do we find time to be present and stay connected? Mindfulness is a popular phrase today and encompasses many different interpretations; meditation, breathing, here and now, present moment, and a list of other names or phrases. Some may use yoga or other exercise programs. Everyone has their “go-to” practice.
One approach that I think is overlooked is “un-conditioning” our minds to let go of the stress of doing instead of being. From the time we are born, we are conditioned to go get something. We learn to crawl or walk towards something. We learn desires, wants, rewards, and other means to “get it” and, as we grow up this conditioning creates our paths. What if we un-conditioned ourselves to focus on being and learned that we can be connected, but with balance and awareness of the present. What if we took the inner child in all of us and remembered to embrace the awe of not knowing the pressure of achieving so much doing?
Please share your comments and thank you for reading.