Be Here Now
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NEWSLETTER #7 | JULY 2023
Life moves pretty fast.
I don’t know about you, but I’m someone who likes to move fast. Who thrives on action. Who loves - no - needs to be busy.
In fact, if I’m not being productive I’m not really sure what to do with myself.
Most days, my life is lived as one continuous flow of tasks, each with a box next to it just begging to be ticked. My status update reads ‘to do’. My autobiography will be titled Doing. My grave stone will say simply: ‘DONE’.
Like Ferris Beuller before me, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
And we all know it’s true, right?
If only I could be more present. I need to have a go at meditation. I must be more grateful for what I have. Why can’t I stop thinking about work when I’m with my kids?
So easy to realise. So hard to rectify.
“You’ve one foot in the past and one foot in the future” my friend Col once told me.
“So what does that mean?” I asked.
“It means you’re pissing on the present.”
Rumour has it Craig David hand-draws a watch onto his wrist; at the centre of the watch-face is the word ‘now’ so that when he’s asked what time it is…
Great actors and top tennis players alike have mastered the art of being in the moment. If they aren’t, the illusion is shattered; the point is lost.
Even Noel Gallagher figured it out: “Open up your eyes get a grip on yourself inside” he wrote on Be Here Now.
The truth is that our lives are nothing more than the accumulation of that to which we pay attention. And that’s all that being present is; the masterful control of our attention to focus only on what is happing right now.
Too often future plans and the busy-ness they require soak into our present, absorbing our attention and absolving us of responsibility for attending to the moment.
We set goals and devise strategies, routes and plans to reach them. And that’s great - essential sometimes. But perhaps it doesn’t need to be our default.
Rather, we can navigate by compass. Making choices based not on what we want to have but on how we want to be. Reframing our priorities from targets to achieve to ways we are. Setting a course not fixing a destination. A circuitous journey not an efficient route. Just quietly doing the next most necessary thing.
We can eschew life goals, career progression, accumulation, progress, power, control, time management, to do lists - even if just for a brief while.
And instead, we can pay attention. See with fresh eyes. Occasionally be astonished. Stop and look around once in a while at this fast moving life.
Before we miss it altogether.
Inwards, onwards & upwards,
George
