Being Here Now
Letting go of productivity culture opens the door to living fully in the present.
What I read: “How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity” by Maria Popova.
Over the course of the decades during which I’ve walked upon this planet, I have spent much of that time obsessed with goals, personal systems, and productivity generally. I’m mostly done with that, but programming cemented into me at a young age to be constantly busy and productive is difficult to keep at bay. I wrote about my later-in-life mindset shift in “Jumping Off the Hamster Wheel.”
By no means am I suggesting that you don’t learn, create, organize, improve, assist, or otherwise do good things in the world or try to improve yourself and your life. But the type of hyper productivity so often promulgated by the plethora of books, articles, and other media about increasing productivity assumes that everyone does and should want to keep ramping up their productivity levels ad nauseam.
I, for one, have come to my senses. I’ve jumped off that hamster wheel.
When one jumps off the productivity hamster wheel, how to spend one’s time becomes another concern that plagues a brain like mine. Instead of worrying about being productive I worry about how to not be productive. Silly I know. But I’m nothing if not a complex amalgam of multitudes.
Years ago, I read Ram Dass’s Be Here Now. In that iconic book, Dass details his path to a spiritual awakening. Much of that awakening centers on the ubiquitous concept of being present (thus, be here now).
When Maria Popova writes about Annie Dillard’s sense of presence from Dillard’s book, The Writing Life, it harkened back to what I learned from Dass’s book and so many philosophers, writers, teachers, and spiritual leaders since. The concept of being present runs through much of modern self-help material too although sometimes it’s packaged as a means by which to prepare to be productive and goal oriented which often defeats the purpose.
Underlying the protestations of those who believe in hyper productivity, success (whatever that might mean), and heaven help us, the modern “maxxing” movement, when any form of idleness or unproductive time is suggested, is what I believe to be fear. Fear of not measuring up to others. Fear of not keeping up with the Joneses. Fear of not being attractive or sexy enough. Fear of not having enough money (beyond simple survival). Fear of not being perceived as successful. And so on. Fear forms the cornerstone of so much of our modern life busyness and our craving to squeeze more productive time out of each day.
In “I’m Bored. You Should Be Too.” I wrote about how I use meditation to help bludgeon my propensity to remain constantly busy.
I meditate for a few minutes each morning, which helps. Meditation is a type of controlled and purposeful boredom meant to calm the mind and that calm increases our mental capacities and better regulates our body’s systems.
But apart from meditation, I have struggled with implementing regular intentional periods of quiet calm without purpose (my description of boredom). I keep trying and slowly I am making progress.
I still meditate. I still struggle to resist packing my calendar or creating to do lists chockful of too many things any human can do in one day or even a lifetime. But I’ve begun to embrace a sense of presence while resisting a scheduled life to which Dillard alludes.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Perhaps the most difficult thing about being present, which sometimes entails doing nothing specific at all, is that the mundane is not worshiped in our culture. The exceptional is worshiped. The mundane is denigrated. But it’s in the mundane day-to-day sameness of schedule and activity that true freedom lies.
Om…
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