Being Present

Photo by Kavi Creation

The Artist is Present: in 2010 the performance artist Marina Abramovic, sat down on a chair in a white space at MoMA in New York for 7 hours every day, for 100 days. In front of her a table and another chair. Anyone was welcome to sit down in the chair although Marina would only stare and not utter a word. Half a million people visited the exhibition, with people queuing for hours to get to share some time with the artist. Many people who sat across Marina were brought to tears, because they felt that the other person was truly present, the felt a real connection. 

As Marina herself said brilliantly: “The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you.” Most of the time, we are doing something, thinking about something, being busy, either through action or in our minds. 

We do not take enough time to be present with the people we are with. Do not take the people you love for granted. How many times are we in somebody's presence, someone we care about, but if we are truly honest with ourselves and them, we have to admit we are not truly present: our minds wander to things that pre-occupy us, things we need to do. 

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new." -- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Instead we would do better to practice active listening, where we are fully focused on the person we are with. Listening is far more important than speaking, we learn more from listening than we ever will from speaking. And listening without constructing our answers, counter-arguments, ... in our mind. Even if you are having a discussion and you (originally) hold different opinions about a specific topic, if we are only focused on our own side of the story and our own arguments to support the story, we will fail to learn that their are always other sides to any story, that there are always other ways to look at an event and that our view is nothing but that ... a perception of how we see reality. 

The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing because it is demanding all of you." -- Marina Abramovic

We can practice our minds, through meditation and mindfulness, to be more in the here and now. The very moment we are in, is the only point in time that is real and the only one that matters.

Think about it: whatever is in the post, is gone. We very often dwell on the past, we linger onto events that had a significant emotional impact on us. We re-live parts of our past (sometimes over and over) in order to make sense of it or to torture ourselves with alternative outcomes, the famous "I should have ..."

If you had a bad experience or a bad day, know that there is always the opportunity to do better. We continuously get a change to show that we have learned from what happened before. 

Even the moment just prior to this moment looses it's importance once it is gone, since a new moment has already come and replaced it. The only reality is the now. 

The future is nothing more than speculation and projection. If you are carrying a lot of weight from your past, it will determine how you see your future, leading to anxiety, procrastination, ... 

If we free ourselves from that weight, we approach the future as it truly is: full of endless possibilities.