March 18 – Present

It seems like my thoughts have to run all over the place, zig-zagging around the world before they settle on one thing. Even once I find some focus, I am easily distracted.

For example, this morning while I am writing I look out my window and see a gray cat acting strangely. She’s at the edge of the wooded area in the yard, bouncing around, arching, even flipping backward. She’s either got some prey – a mouse or a bird – or she’s trying to jump out of her skin. 

Gradually she edges herself back into the woods. She alternates between gyrations and perfect stillness. I put down my journal and go outside to get a better look. Another cat – tortoiseshell – comes by, out of curiosity, I believe, and stands several feet away, watching. Although I keep the fence between the cats and me, we are like a tableau: the tortoiseshell cat and me, watching the gray cat wrestle, pause, wrestle. The dogs next door bound up and down the yard, clueless as to what is happening a few feet away.

Eventually, the tortoiseshell loses interest, and I go back inside to get warm and refill my coffee mug. But the gray cat stays focused. 

I go back to watching her through my window. Pretty soon, she comes bouncing out of the wooded area again and I can see she has something, probably a mouse, which is clearly losing the battle.

It takes a long time for a cat to kill a mouse. It’s just the way they do things. And they are completely focused, present, all through the ordeal.

Being present in the moment is hard for humans to do because we have minds that like to wander around the abstract. We amble around between where we have been and where we are going, and only occasionally alight on where we are right at the moment.

I recently watched the documentary film, Free Solo, which follows Alex Honnold as he climbs the 900-meter vertical rock face of El Capitan. He does it without any support – no harnesses, no ropes. Just his hands and feet.

They say this kind of climbing is an experience that forces you to be completely present. There is zero margin for error; if your mind wanders, you’re done. Every inch of your attention is focused on your body and the piece of wall in front of you. There is no room for fear, it would seem.

Danger forces your mind to be focused, present. But the discipline can be practiced in other ways. You can do anything mindfully, practicing being fully present in the act and the moment.

Brother Lawrence speaks of this in the little book called The Practice of the Presence of God, He taught himself that every chore, however small, could be done simply for the love of God, and in the moment he would be completely devoted to it.

This is the goal, the intent, of mindfulness: to find God and be present with God. 

But we have to unlearn a lot to get there. 

Most of our waking moments, our minds are in the past. Sometimes we think about the future. And for what? 

Surely everyone goes about like a shadow. Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; they heap up, and do not know who will gather. And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you.(Ps 39:6-7)

Only rarely are we present in the place and time we are – the present. But that is exactly where Jesus is. And when I think about it, that’s where I’d really like to be too.

Photo Credit: By Jennifer Barnard - originally posted to Flickr as Prey, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3820113