By Adam
The problem with good advice, especially the kind that can be condensed into a very small sentence, is that it comes at you so fast that it’s easy to nod along and agree without really letting it penetrate without savoring it and understanding what it truly means. When you hear things like “live each day as if it were your last,” or “believe in yourself and anything’s possible,” we nod, even if we haven’t absorbed the meaning or lived it as an experience.
For me, one of those phrases was: be present. I had always assumed this was simply a matter of staying off my phone, or paying attention at the dinner table when I’m with friends. But as many spiritual teachers have said, there’s a difference between knowledge and knowing. It is one thing to have knowledge about something; knowing is about embodying it, feeling it, doing it, going on the journey.
Here is an example. Any time something interesting is happening in front of me, a say a performance or something unexpected, I have this instinct to reach for my phone immediately. There I am with the phone between me and this wonderful thing unfolding before me. This might seem like an obvious case of failing to be present. But something else is happening…something subtle, something hidden, and it matters. Do you know what it is?
There is a bartering happening inside me. I tell myself there’s a future version of me who will go back into my photo reel, find that video, and watch it in a state of perfect stillness. But he is the future version of me: The one where I’m no longer a work in progress. Unlike me right now, he has reached the bottom of his to-do list. He has arrived at a place in life where he can put everything aside, be quiet, and give his full attention to this performance now saved on his phone. So I trade the distracted me of right now for that calmer future self and tell myself it will be worth the sacrifice. I carry knowledge about being present, but the knowing isn’t there. I’m not living it, not experiencing it. Knowledge and knowing are not the same thing.
Here is another example. A friend of mine was really excited to start going to the gym. He came back and showed me everything he had purchased: Brand new shoes, the gym outfit, the water bottle, the gym bag, the whole ensemble. He was thrilled, and had clearly enjoyed some significant retail therapy in the process. There’s a mistake we sometimes make: we believe that taking the first step of a journey means we’re already on it. Despite all that enthusiasm, my friend barely made it to the gym. But it fed into a belief that the future was going to hold that promise.
I have no room to judge. Whenever I walk into a stationery store, I can’t help buying one of those expensive, high-quality Japanese notebooks even though at home I have a whole stack of them, some of which I haven’t even opened. I haven’t written a single thing in them. Yet I keep doing this, because the pull isn’t really about the product. It’s about the life I want to have. I want to be someone who carves out quiet moments, sitting alone with my thoughts, trading the speed of typing for the slow, deliberate stroke of a pen. That is a life I want badly. Buying this notebook, the first step of that journey, must mean I’m already on it.
Ram Dass has a name for this promise we make to ourselves about the future, the very thing that pulls us out of the present. He calls it time binding. He describes driving around New York, going in circles, until something struck him: no matter where he went, he was always right there. This is eveident in the way we say things to show it is always going to be better somewhere else in another time:
“hey, what do you say we go…”
“have you seen the new…”
“how about we check out the…”
It is always “out there” somewhere.
It is never the right time to just arrive in our happiness.
This is why we come to meditation. We gather and make a deliberate decision to stop. That may be the most important thing we do when we sit down: Simply stopping. Because we are always searching for something. But sometimes, to find what you’re truly looking for, the best thing you can do is end the search.
Hakone Zendo 