After my mamacita passed away, I sat down with the priest to plan the funeral. He was a relatively new priest and didn’t know my parents well since their volunteering had started winding down in their 70s.
“Tell me about your mother.” He encouraged and I shared stories about her gardening and grandparenting. It was while we were talking about my mamacita as a grandmother that something struck me, something I had never really observed or characterized in this way.
“She was profoundly present.”
If you were sitting with my mom, you were all she focused on. This presence was an incredible gift to her grandchildren.
I’m not present like that, I remember thinking. And even though I knew that where I was in life at the time-teaching university classes, writing, facilitating workshops and retreats, helping to lead a non-profit, parenting, partnering, etc.– meant many balls had to be in the air at once (a perfect storm for split attention), I didn’t like that that was true.
I yearned to cultivate more of the presence my mamacita embodied, as a gift to me and those around me and also as a way of honoring her life. To me, that presence reflected a purity of choice, of being heart-led, of distilling. I am efficient and productive and while those traits can be strengths, they can also be weaknesses. I wanted greater balance, more intention, more heart. But you don’t just get to greater presence by saying you want it. Or I don’t. I had to prepare for it, make changes for it, choose presence over and over again.
In thinking about what I needed to do to be more present, I knew that one of my challenges was how overcommitted I was. Ultimately, I knew my life, and, more specifically, my responsibilities, needed to be smaller in order for me to practice the presence I desired. So, I evaluated what needed to be downsized or released in order for me to practice more presence. Many commitments weren’t ones I felt I could immediately give up, but I deliberately thought about the soonest time possible for a break.
I also relentlessly recommitted myself to The Wholehearted Continuum (for those of you who aren’t familiar with my WHC, it’s a litmus test I came up with years ago to help me discern whether or not I should say yes to any sort of opportunity). Because my default tendency is to say all the yeses, I periodically backslide in my wholeheartedness practice and have to go back to deliberately walking myself through each step of the WHC before making a decision. I started keeping list of things to which I had said no to remind me of how I was paving the way to greater presence. With every observation, no, and change in responsibilities, I relished the deepening in presence that it brought me.
Moreover, when Happy complained to me last year that “I was always on my phone”, I decided to take a closer look at his point of view rather than dismiss him out of pocket. In the grand scheme of things, I didn’t consider myself a big phone user. In fact, during my workday (which is while Happy is at school), I likely wasn’t on an app on my phone for more than 20 minutes total in the day. I have so few minutes to work and so much work to do that I just don’t have time for that. But, if I was honest, after Happy and I shared snack time (where he told me about his day) and went through his homework, I started dinner as he finished his homework, calling me over when he needed me to check something. In those minutes while the oven was preheating and the onions were browning, I found myself lost in my phone. So, no, I wasn’t on my phone all that much during the day but TO HAPPY, I was on the phone the only time it mattered, when I was supposed to be mostly tending to him (while also please cooking him a great dinner). Seeing my phone use through Happy’s eyes made me realize he had a point and I started putting it away during that time which meant I was practicing even more presence where it mattered.
I pulled my journal back out and used it as a place to capture my intentions, the actions that could support my intentions, my values, how I wanted to those values to show up in my life and more.
A final change that liberated me came from realizing that a quirk of my personality is to fixate on the next big thing coming up, often to the detriment of other things I want to be doing. For example, if I am flying out of town at two in the afternoon, I would get to the airport super early just in case, letting things that I might have done that morning to care for myself (things that reasonably I had time to do) or be in company with others slide off the to do list so that I could be sitting at my gate hours and hours early. This fixation on the next big thing on my schedule meant I often deny myself the ability to practice presence in other ways. I eventually observed the disservice of this practice enough that I decided that despite my anxiety and the discomfort of having less time cushion, I could indeed divide my energy and lessen my hyper-focus. By asking myself if this tendency/quirk allowed me to be my best self and thrive, I realized I was actually making my life smaller and giving myself less ways to be present.
Recently, I came across a note that I scrawled in response to a prompt that I gave in a writing class I thought years ago.
The prompt was simply: I am a woman/man/person who… 
and I wrote: I am a woman who is suddenly aware that I can control my destiny by creating the day that I most wish to have.
What I know now is that the day that I most wish to have is far less about the specific things I am doing and more about how I am energetically able to be over the span of hours I have available to me. I want my heart show up in all that I am doing. For you. For me. For my values and beliefs and the possibilities before me and the most profound way that I can do that is by choosing the behaviors that allow be to be present over and over again.
What do you want to be practicing in your life these days?
How can you prepare to move towards that feeling?
