Be Present??? But what about nostalgia? What about fantasy? What about rumination?

Posted on by Live & Learn

I’ve been thinking a lot about being present and wondering why I should strive to achieve it. I am a parent. I am a professor. I have a life, and a job, that typically require not just my physical presence but my full emotional attention. This is what I’ve come to understand, via osmosis, at least: to succeed I need to be present. Ostensibly this is for my own wellbeing; but the implication is that I am also responsible for the wellbeing of others. In failing to be present, I might risk harming them too…

In the intervening decades, mindfulness – defined as the practice of being present – has become a popular life hack, a daily self-care ritual…Stress reduction, better memory, better sleep, less pain, lower blood pressure, more compassion. The supposed health benefits are so numerous that “being present” seems like a miracle drug. Currently, there’s no fitness tracker that can measure compassion levels in the body; but many of the other measures can be recorded and graphed. Mindfulness starts to resemble a workout, in which a person’s performance can be scored and bettered.

Or a commodity. The mantra goes: “When you focus on yesterday, you cannot be present today. When you focus on tomorrow, you cannot be present today.” To spend time in the past or the future, plainly put, is to not be in the present. Stray to these other temporal zones and you risk rumination, with its potentially negative impacts on your mood, mind and body.

But what about nostalgia? What about fantasy? Are these so terrible? As it happens, I’d even like to make a pitch for rumination. Obsessive thinking doesn’t always lead nowhere; it can be like an inescapably intense form of dreaming. We might call this “drumination”. If the past and the future aren’t viewed as sites of harmful dread or regret, drumination might even be deemed healthy. Such a state could, with caution and critical thinking, guide ingenuity and creativity.

I guess I’m wary of the extent to which, now that it’s so widely sold and bought, the present, and the goal of living perpetually in it, might be misunderstood, or misused, or boiled down to nearly nonsense. To be forbidden, for the sake of your health, to exit the present might be a means of evading responsibility or consequence; to live in and for the present is to potentially exempt people from a continuum of cause and effect. To do this – to discourage people from linking the present to the past, and projecting into the future – is to create, paradoxically, an inescapable health risk.

Take this moment, right now. As I write, the air outside my New York apartment has been deemed “hazardous”. There are forest fires in Canada, and today the smoke arrived from the north. My husband said, “It’s like 9/11 out there,” and it was – the acrid smell, the yellow-grey haze that strikes the eye as incredibly wrong, or alarming. Our past was revisiting us and adding psychological heft to the moment. It felt, in a wrenching way, right to be recalling that time, recalling that fear, and using it as a way to think about the future and how different it might be from our formerly wildest imaginings. Our present hummed, urgently and compellingly with what had gone before and what might be awaiting us. I don’t know that an ethical life can be lived these days without a druminating eye cast toward such things.

At least, we reasoned, we might see an otherworldly sunset. We walked to the Hudson river and looked towards the apartment buildings of New Jersey, predicting something beautiful and uncanny might bloom inside the dinge, as the particles sieved most of the colour frequencies from the sky, releasing only orange. We waited. We watched a softball game. Abramović, over the course of her performance, presumably learned to tame her mind. Her most impressive feat may have been to be both present and not. To make people cry as her mind was elsewhere. We, meanwhile, kept our eyes trained to the horizon. All we saw in that present moment, and the next and the next and the next, was smoke.

—  Heidi Julavits, excerpts from “The big idea: why you shouldn’t always try to live in the moment” (The Guardian · July 3, 2023)

25 thoughts on “Be Present??? But what about nostalgia? What about fantasy? What about rumination?”

  1. I often feel overwhelmed by all the ‘formulas’ we have these days for ‘living our best lives.’ Do this, not that, stay present, don’t dismiss past patterns, fast, eat plenty of fermented foods, get eight hours of sleep a night, don’t sleep more than four, wash your hands for at least two rounds of ‘Happy Birthday to you,’ don’t wash your sheets more than once every two weeks so you build your resistance for mites and other environmental critters, and on and on and on. Today, I am going to take a day off from the gym, float in the pool, eat something naughty like a cheeseburger and thank my lucky stars for the fact that I can greet another day. Will get back to druminating tomorrow. 😉

    2. That’s the best way to live, I say. Take whatever the “newests musts” with a huge grain of salt; live your life; inject some naughty into the nice for balance…

  2. Time for me get my thoughts together and write them down – for I consider my ability to ruminate is a strength (teasing here). Yet again we view the paradox – be in the present despite the view that yesterday is the reality we reference; recognize the indulgence of fantasy, but not so much that it becomes the obsession…

    1. Yin and yang are dark and light, down and up, inner and outer, old and young, water and fire, Earth and Heaven. […]

      We are looking to find how illnesses arise from imbalances in the bodily form of yin and yang. They interact like night flowing into day and winter into summer. One is always rising and one is al-ways falling, never stopping. […]

      Yin and yang always struggle for balance, with the darkness of yin sometimes winning and the brightness of yang striving to bring things back into balance. {…]

      … yin and yang, are we not? The constant push and pull between good and evil, love and hate, honor and disgrace, all of which follow each other in an unending cycle. […]

      I was looking for what we call striking yin and salient yang. This occurs when the pulse thrums against my fingertips . […]

      — Lisa See, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, A Novel (Simon & Schuster, June 6, 2023)

      1. Read this last week, highlighting the sentence about ‘striking yin and salient yang’…The book itself didn’t disappoint; perhaps more lyrical than The Island Of The Sea Women, though the latter was in my view, a better story. She gives such life to these characters, wrestling with elements of the human condition that are so identifiable to anyone, in any year..

  3. In my layperson’s opinion, there’s nothing wrong with thinking about the past (and maybe learning from it), or thinking about the future (perhaps to figure out what you want out of life down the road). I also think it’s fine to take a “mental health break from the present“ by doing a little daydreaming or fantasizing. I believe if we are (at the same time) aware that we are doing those types of thinking, then we are being mindful.

    The trick is that we don’t want to get so lost or “stuck“ thinking about the past/future/fantasy that we completely forget about the present (and thus forget to appreciate it). We also don’t want to HIDE in past/future/fantasy thinking in order to escape from things in the present that need to be dealt with.

    … just my $0.02.

  5. I love this, David. Thank you for sharing. I love how sensibly but beautifully she speaks. Sensible is not always pretty.

    I’m just grateful for the ability to stay present when I need to. And the ability to time travel, like a bee. And I feel like there’s another dimension. It’s not the present, past, or future. It’s this grey area in between, where we get to rest.

  6. I would ask is it possible not to be present?!? … and agree that the monetizing of anything carries with it questionable motives, therefore, not trustworthy as sources of wisdom.

    I’ve come to understand that the present is what always is, regardless of who, what and where we are.
    I think it was Michael Meade who said, “There’s no way not to be who you are and where you are right now.”

  7. You can have it all when you learn to be present in any given moment. Acknowledge the past. Dream of the future. Ruminate and hypothesize. We are human and have amazing brains to use. The key is not to let our thinking take over so we are never really here, but in our heads.
    My view of the latest “advice”? When I hear a “should” I run.

Leave a Reply