What's Changing? - Presence

Please see below selected recent presence-related change.

See also:

• What's New? - Presence

December 2023

• The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s insisted that “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”

February 2023

• The idea that happiness is more than just how we feel at any one moment has been around since Aristotle. Today, psychology draws a distinction between emotional well-being in the present and overall life satisfaction. This distinction, however, is a mistake. Life satisfaction is just a small part of our overall emotional well-being. Happiness is always judged in the present, not from some abstract vantage point that views our life as a whole, argued Steven Campbell-Harris for iai TV.

September 2021

• "Fulfilment cannot come when the present moment is merely a struggle to bear in service of the future," wrote Arthur C. Brooks in an article for The Atlantic that described the immense benefits of the simple practice of walking. "If we want to find true satisfaction, we must instead focus on the walk that is life, with its string of present moments."

June 2021

• Life is full of moments where we are meant to feel certain things. The demand starts in early childhood: it’s our birthday – and we are meant to feel happy. Dad is going away for two weeks – and we should feel sad. Our school has won at team sports – and we should want to join in with a celebratory song. Adulthood continues the injunctions: we should feel devastated at funerals, touched and hopeful at weddings, enthused and moved by our families, carefree on holiday - and, in bed with someone we like, exclusively focused on the act and its pleasures. But, in truth, our thoughts are seldom exactly in sync with outward events. They have tendencies to be vagabond, unfaithful and unruly. We rarely feel exactly what we’re meant to when we’re meant to, noted The School of Life.

October 2018

• One of the dangers of emotional life, notes The School of Life, is that we find that we don't feel 'in the moment': we're at a funeral, but we don't feel sad. We're making love, but our minds are elsewhere. It's our birthday, but we're not jolly. Why is it sometimes so hard for our true inner feelings to keep pace with events in the outer world? 

September 2018

• Brain Pickings noted that the meaning of life has been pondered by such literary icons as Leo Tolstoy (1904), Henry Miller (1918), Anaïs Nin (1946), Viktor Frankl (1946), Italo Calvino (1975), and David Foster Wallace (2005). And although some have argued that today’s age is one where “the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning,” there is an unshakable and discomfiting sense that, in our obsession with optimising our creative routines and maximising our productivity, we have forgotten how to be truly present in the mystery of life.

August 2018

• The concept the 200-year present is a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today.
• Is living in the moment really the only way to find inner peace? Many believe there is only one "reality"; the moment we are in right "now", and that everything else is pure fantasy.
• Others believe in living the hours: for example, in the Christian monastic tradition, every day follows a rhythm of eight "Hours," which mark nuances of morning, noon, night, and between times.
• The author of the extraordinary Spell of the Sensuous explained that we have to be present, not future-oriented, before we can start to change the world.

Pre 2018

• Since we can't directly access the past or the future, the present seems to be all we've got. Yet Jacques Derrida denied the existence of the present. And physicists argue the present has no special status. Is the present an illusion? Or do we find in the present everything that is of value, asked an iai debate?
• Focusing too much on the future can reduce our attention in the present moment, making us more likely to miss significant things that are happening now. This lack of presence can cause problems with relationships at work and home. What’s more, constantly thinking about what’s to come can leave us less productive today and worse, emotionally drained.