My eyes take in some version of the above scene once or twice a week. It flashes before me about a half-hour into my morning jog, just a minute or two after my turnaround point on the Delaware Canal towpath, and then vanishes behind a line of trees within five or six steps. My brain barely has a chance to process anything beyond “Wow,” before my focus has shrunk from that beautiful big-picture perspective to whatever granular “real-world stuff” I’m going to have to face a couple miles down the path.
The other day, I forced myself to stop — OK, slow, not that I ever move particularly fast — long enough to snap a quick picture. Guess you could say I had the presence of mind to realize how seldom I’m truly present in the moments of my life, and here was a perfect example.
(Of course, my intention all along was to use the example in a blog post, in the future, so…maybe that doubly proves the point? 🤔)
See, the human tendency to time travel is truly torturous. We know our time here is finite, and fleeting, and all we really have to work with/revel in is now, and yet our brains insist on ruminating or rushing ahead. Or they immediately conjure up some distraction, usually involving a cell phone, like how I’m currently standing on the deck of this amazing log cabin in the Poconos at 5AM on a Sunday, under a glittering canopy of stars, playing an episode of “Better Call Saul” on the Netflix app while typing in WordPress and posting a new cover photo on my Facebook profile, for some unfathomable reason…
I also noticed during my pre-dawn, caffeine-fueled meanderings that the mantle clock in the rental cabin had stopped, which I thought was fitting, given the theme of this post. My husband’s and my weekend getaway was, ostensibly, about “slowing down” and “getting away from it all.” And it’s not that I didn’t sit still or couldn’t be quiet or wasn’t totally focused on him/us during our long talk on a long walk along the D&H Rail Trail near his hometown of Honesdale. I was present while we lounged together on the deck in the cozy afternoon sun, sipping Recess mocktails…though if I’m honest, I must admit I was also counting the minutes until I could pop those frozen pizzas in the oven…😋
In moments of solitude, I occasionally caught myself reaching, tapping, scrolling, thinking myself into total dissociation, or getting up and moving around with no real idea of where I was going or why. And interestingly, after less than 48 hours in that open space and peaceful (near)-silence, I started feeling run down, complete with sore throat, stuffy sinuses and aching muscles in my neck and upper back.
Trying to be present is so taxing that it makes me ill? 🤒
WTF is so hard about being all there?
The main issue for me, I think, is fear. It lives in my bones, a hair-trigger “smoke alarm” that drives me to protect myself from or brace for what’s coming next, lest I let that thing/person/circumstance hurt me — or throw my carefully constructed Type-A plans off course. My system senses danger, far off in the distance, even when everything around me seems peaceful and serene. And like a hypervigilant firehose, it starts spraying at any perceived hazard, extinguishing whatever awe, wonder, joy, gratitude or meaning can be found in the here-and-now.
Examples, as I’ve just illustrated, abound. But nowhere is the impact of this scene-stealing survival instinct more apparent than in the latter half of a run on the canal. Or in the return hike home from my neighborhood state park. Or in any transition from early to mid morning, the space between “my time” — usually out in nature — and “business hours.” Between sweet freedom and what society says I’m “supposed” to do/be.
Some days, the jolt happens when I wake from a blissful catnap on the couch, after I got out of bed at 2AM and came downstairs for coffee, catching up on client notes, or blogging by the light of Yankee Candles — and the TV, which is always on. I’m hit with the urgent feeling that I’m late for something — or, maybe that’s just my bladder, which won’t 🤬-ing let me shut my brain off for more than 45 minutes at at time anymore — and the depressing knowledge that I do actually have some “adulting”-type thing I have to get through that day and cannot just lie there wrapped in a blanket forever and ever. I mean, I can, if I want to feel guilty for being lazy and useless and shirking my responsibilities, and to pee myself on top of that…
Indoors or out, the struggle to stay manifests itself both physically and metaphysically. I can feel dread begin to course through my bloodstream as I near that daily transition point, diluting the euphoria of the “runner’s high,” or the rare serenity of a regulated nervous system. And I’m left with a mixture of grief — the best is over — and anxiety — the struggle begins anew.
It’s like I have glimpsed heaven — a safe, comfortable place where I feel good and whole and loved, unconditionally — and it’s so, so painful to be forced back into The Suffering, into the acknowledgment of the knowledge: Nothing good can stay. Existence will hurt. We’re all gonna die.
A tremendous sense of loss washes over me in those “moments of truth” that, as a Highly Sensitive Person, I find really hard to handle. I always have. It’s why I drank, I think; I needed a highly potent salve to ease my existential distress, a powerful numbing agent to help push me through the passage from adolescence to adulthood — which, consequently, turned into a dark tunnel spanning 20 years. It’s why I can’t drink now, if I want to stay alive, but why I still sometimes yearn for the “easy” escape of alcohol, even after five years — 63 months; close to 2,000 days — of continuous sobriety.
It’s why stillness and presence remain so maddeningly elusive, and why I have to move my body in some way every day, just to feel OK.
Time keeps pushing forward, inching me closer to the end of the line, and I desperately want to stop it, yet I can’t handle standing still? Makes perfect sense! 🤯
It’s just too much, standing in one place and staring at the sky, the stars, the mountains, the trees, the horizon off in the distance… Even the most bland-looking, nondescript sky on a random day can bring the deepest of emotions roaring up in me, and it’s so hard to look that it can seem hard to live, as an HSP but also as a sober person. I always say — and now, I frequently tell my therapy clients — that beating addiction means “signing up for life,” because being fully alive means being fully aware. It means feeling what it’s like to really care about what’s happening, inside and all around us. And that sure ain’t comfortable!
Presence is a willingness to meet each moment with clear eyes and an open heart, to face the “danger,” feel the fear, inhabit our vulnerability, and stay put, holding space for exhilarating joy and excruciating grief at the same time. We have to allow all those emotions to whip up their storm without letting ourselves get swept away in the funnel cloud.
I wish I could tell you time makes this easier, but God help me if I know what the 🤬 to make of time. It is, perhaps, the greatest contradiction known to humankind; it’s the only portal we have to growth, self-discovery, recovery, and fulfillment, and no matter how much we want to rush to attain those things with as little pain as possible, we also want time to give us a break. It’s relentless, forcing change upon us despite our most strenuous objections, ripping away our sense of safety and throwing us into an abyss of uncertainty every damn day. The clock keeps ticking, both too fast and not fast enough, and we can’t do a damn thing to control it.
It’s enough to drive a person to distraction, addiction, insanity…wasn’t that the whole point of the Rust Cohle character on “True Detective,” who became such a philosophical icon?
My point is that we really only have one choice when it comes to our time: whether or not to experience it. Whether that means fully enjoying it or simply appreciating it or “white-knuckling” it or hating it with a passion that’s so big and hot you feel like you’re going to spontaneously combust (that’s called perimenopause 😨) — it will vary, moment to moment. Presence is all of that. It’s up to each of us to weigh the options, aliveness vs. avoidance, and determine cost/benefit for ourselves.
Running away from the pain of the present moment has cost me my freedom, trapping my body, mind, spirit and soul in the cycle of addiction via all types of habitual distraction. I don’t have enough practice with presence — not yet — to truly understand all the benefits. Fear still entraps me in many different ways. But I have captured quite a few snapshots of heaven in my journey out of hell, so I do know for sure that it’s there. I mean, it’s here. And like a quaint log cabin you rent for a weekend, it’s not meant as a “forever home” or permanent escape.
You can stop the clocks, but the stars will still vanish as the sun comes up and starts moving, keeps moving, toward the other side of the sky. I think I finally get it now: To resist that process of transition and change is to miss the miracle of this one life that I’ve decided is worth “signing up” for.
In it, heaven is just one part of a great big, complicated, awe-inspiring picture. It won’t always be easy to spot, and it might look different each time it appears, but appear it most certainly will. My assignment is simple: to be paying attention when/wherever it comes ’round again.
Jen Wielgus Journalism 