When I Am Not Here, I Am Not Living
Be here. Be here, be here, be here. This is the refrain that I’ve come to tell myself when I’m too much in my head. Often I am my most present on a walk in the hills, but even there I can sometimes find myself an hour in and realising I haven’t been there at all. I haven't really seen anything, I haven’t heard any birds, I haven’t been living in this life - I’ve been somewhere else entirely.
When I am not here, I am not living - this is what I have learned. Here is not a place marked on a map, it is not a set of conditions or circumstances, it is just presence. It is being, body and mind, in this minute - looking at what’s actually here, and feeling the breeze against your skin, yes, but mostly it is having your thoughts tethered and peaceful rather than running wildly into the future.
We live in a world obsessed with achievement and next steps that means we default to a there-centric way of being. I see it in the questions I’m always asked on Instagram - what do I do when it feels so far away? What do I do when it feels impossible to get where I want to be? How do I get there? I am no stranger to existing there instead of here, to spending time daydreaming and longing and planning and thinking about what it will be like once I have achieved something. I used to think about how perfect life would be once I was working for myself, then I thought about how perfect it would be to live in a house of my own, then I thought about everything I’d do once I’d moved house.
The obvious thing to say here is that obviously the “there” keeps moving and changing so it becomes a place you can never be - but you already know that. You’ve heard enough people on the internet say it, and have lived that exact same pattern enough, to know that it’s true. The real problem to me is that hours of this daydreaming about there adds up to days of daydreaming, and those days add up to months, to years, to a life of mentally existing in another time.
This is a twilight, half-waking kind of life - a lumbering body not feeling itself brush against stinging nettles while closed eyes focus on an imagined future. A life lived only in your head is not one that is fulfilling, or true. The only life that’s real, that’s true - is the one that is here.
We need to shift the prominence of here and there. I am not advocating an all or nothing, either/or approach - you must not force yourself to be only present and punish yourself for drifting into flights of fancy. I think it’s important to have a “there” in order to maintain some hope, some momentum in a direction - we just need to not let ourselves live there, to see our “there” as a symbol and not a genuine destination where our happiness lives.
Your happiness lives where you put it, so why not put it on the table in front of you. Start to catch yourself slipping off to there and say “be here”. Even if it’s just for a little bit. Even if you momentarily lift your head up on a walk and look around. Even if you stretch your arms above your head and feel the sinews in your back.
Presence is a practice. All the little reminders I have given myself to be here have become a habit; without thinking I can now draw back the threads of my thoughts into the now and feel my way to what is needed for happiness now. And now is the only time I can experience it.
