The more present I am, the more fulfilled I tend to be. Happiness is easy, they say: be here now.
So why is it so hard to stay here?
As I groggily opened Twitter this morning, the beginning of a thread stared me in the face: "I'm addicted to focus," it began, above some diagram of a brain scan. I thankfully came to my senses and force-quit the app most responsible for my scattered mind. But that phrase lingered in my head. It's pithy, but somehow probably right: if we are not addicted to focus then we must at least have an unsatiated desire for it.
Our language about presence—focus, flow states, embodiment, on and on—all seems to point to something radically simple: doing one thing at a time.
Unfortunately, I spend much of my time actively trying to do multiple things at once, let alone intentionally settling into a single-minded focus. Our contexts, culture, and technology tend to encourage or demand a buzzing, high-variance approach to attention.[1]
I listened to an interview with Boyd Varty earlier this year. He is a lion tracker, business coach, healer, and writer, among other things. But I think he's best described as someone who helps people unfold into their environment—and by doing so—get closer to themselves. In the conversation, Boyd told his story of spending forty days in the wilderness in South Africa, alone in a tree (I'm paraphrasing: "all the mystics seemed to do something similar, so when Covid came along and gave me the chance I felt I had to see what it was all about").
One part of his story that often comes to mind is a recounting of the daily highlight of his early time in the bush. He brought along a week's worth of oranges, and each day he'd look forward to the treat. He recalled taking out the orange and beginning to gently peel it, bit by bit, with his knife. Then he would slowly savor the aroma of the rind[2] before indulging in the first juicy bite of citrus. Those precious minutes of enjoying a fruit he and so many of us take for granted were as good as pure bliss.
Boyd reflected on how simple this was: the process of enjoying that orange made him realize how precious life's moments can be when we engage in them fully. As beings who try so hard to do anything and everything, often all at once, all the time, we can sleepwalk through the ordinary miracles all around us. But in doing just one thing, right now, here, we are forced to come all the way down into the pure essence of attention.[3]
Just to name a few examples: always multi-tasking, scrolling through 10 isolated pieces of content a minute, laptops in in-person meetings, better-have-my-airpods-in-while-doing-literally-anything, looking at a smaller screen when a bigger one gets boring, notifications vibrating while a friend confides in you... While discussing this with friends, I've observed that the single best way to increase my chances of doing one thing at a time would be to throw my phone as far away from me as possible. Preferably at a wall. The smartphone is dishonest: it is virtual reality—always making demands of us and offering an escape to somewhere else—despite claiming to be a tool that fits seamlessly into our daily, mobile life. Perhaps that is for another essay.
If you've not smelled an orange or tangerine rind recently... pretty sensational. Just sit with it.
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” - Simone Weil
