Take a quick second and look back on the past week or so of your life.
Have you received a text that was truly urgent?
An email that honestly needed to be be responded to right away?
A voicemail that simply could not wait?
If we’re honest, those are few and far between. Most of the time what fills our inboxes and monopolizes our days are a mix of the relatively important, the mildly entertaining, and the honestly less-than-time-sensitive. And yet, we allow those things to dictate our schedules and direct our paths because we’ve grown to feel obligated to them; as if we owe every inquiry an immediate response, as if each matter is equally pressing, as if delay is not an viable option.
Recently, I asked my social media followers what was better when they were younger. The answers were a mix of lighthearted childhood touchstones like sugary breakfast cereals and Saturday morning cartoons, personal mid-life lamentations about expanding waistlines and receding hairlines—among more somber observations about our public discourse, political parties, and general level of empathy.
One of the things I think we were all better at in the past was presence.
Before cell phones and prior to being perpetually available to everyone, when we were at the movies or at a concert or with friends or walking in nature we were fully there without interruption or dilution (aside from our occasionally wandering minds). We weren’t continually being pulled to other places or alerted to more supposedly pressing matters or distracted with capturing our private moments for public consumption. I worry most of us are missing our lives currently in progress. Our inability to be here comes from the fact that we are always on call for the trivial disguised as the urgent.
One of the worst things we’ve normalized is always being reachable: making people think they deserve an instant response to texts, emails, comments, and voicemails. We’ve conditioned other people (and ourselves) that our promptness is some kind of virtue, that the more quickly we respond, the more responsible we are. The expectation this places on each of us is unrealistic and it is not sustainable. We cannot be perpetually available and still be fully present.
We are inundated with requests and needs and news. Now, more than ever, we need to withdraw to silence and stillness and solitude and disappear for a bit. Doing so isn’t a betrayal of our work or the people in our path, but a way of preparing us to be fully present to it all. In those times when we pull away from the crowd (if we can) our minds are recalibrated and our reserves replenished, and when we return to the world we are better able to offer our undivided selves.
Yes, the technology will always be a challenge, but the real and enduring danger is our own preoccupation with being reachable and the fear that we will miss out on something if we are not. If we want to be better at presence, we need to work on absence first.
Most things that appear in our inboxes and timelines can wait, at least a little while.
But the present cannot wait.
It is gone in a flash and once we lose it we can’t get it back.
Today, may you be fully present wherever you happen to be.
Give yourself the gift of disappearing for a bit.
Today, do the sacred work of being unavailable.
