Presence – Day 1

“I wonder what’s wrong,” I said, trying to describe the morass I was in to a friend. “It feels like I’m wandering through a swamp wearing concrete boots.”

“Silly girl,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong. God just doesn’t want you to miss anything.”

Well, there’s a lot of things in my life I wouldn’t have minded missing. Let’s start with my childhood: being molested and blacking out at age thirteen from my alcoholism. I could have done without those things.

Then there was that stabbing pain in my heart when I realized that someone I loved was lying to me, and the years of loneliness while I was a single parent to my two children.

There is nothing I wouldn’t do to have missed the words of that nurse in the hospital after my son Shane’s accident: “Do you have someone you can call? I’m sorry, there’s no hope.” During the years that followed, my feelings vacillated between numbness, rage at God, and overwhelming sadness.

But here’s the problem. If I would have missed out on those things, I would have missed out on some other things, things I wouldn’t have missed for the world: the deep bond I have with my daughter, from the years we spent together in our little single-parent family; the self-esteem and independence I got from raising my family on my own; the compassion that was worked into me from not getting what I wanted as a child; the twelve years I got to spend with my son, Shane. I can still remember what it felt like when he brushed my cheek with a kiss.

It’s not that you take the good with the bad. It runs deeper than that. The good, the bad, and the in-between start to run together and become inseparable. Together, they paint the picture of a life. We can’t create a good scrapbook unless we can remember what happened. We can’t remember it if we weren’t there.

Slow down. Be present. No, not that gaze-into-someone’s- eyes, needy-codependent thing. Just be there. Where you are.

The magic isn’t tomorrow or in some far-off place. The magic is in the moment and the exact details of the situation we’re in right now.

Value: “Hurry-worry never works,” said Tsung Tsai in Bones of the Master. This week we’ll practice being present for ourselves, our emotions, other people, God, work, and life.

From the book: 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact

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