One of my favourite Times columnists, Michael Gove, wrote yesterday expressing his longing for "pure immersion in the moment". He said he'd love to read our thoughts about the best way of being "fully present", but when I went onto the Times website I found that they give us a maximum of 300 characters to comment! Yes, you read right - 300 characters, not 300 words. How on earth can I squeeze all that I have to say about this subject into 300 characters without resorting to TxtSpk?
I'm not going to try and compete with his suggestion of surfing, as risk-taking just isn't the way I get my buzz, though I can see how a feeling of danger can bring about a total focus on what's going on for you at that moment, I'm sure that facing a huge wave and concentrating on survival would mean you don't suddenly find yourself thinking about the shopping list or the person you were supposed to be phoning or the report for the boss. But there are other ways of getting that pure focus. (Actually, I was surprised to find a man asking about this - my impression has been that men are much better than us at focusing on whatever they're doing and forgetting about everything else, whilst women tend to juggle lots more different activities and are not so good at shutting out the world and its distractions, which is probably the way we're programmed so that we could be good mothers. Babies wouldn't survive very well if their mothers were too good at focusing on what they're doing to the exclusion of everything else.)
But the question was about ways of being fully present in the moment, which is, as he says, quite rare these days as people tend to rush around so much - the developments of technology, instead of those optimistic fantasies of a life of leisure which I remember reading about in sci-fi when I was young, have brought us more pressure, higher expectations, and much less peace and quiet. To be able to focus on the moment these days you need to switch off a huge number of gadgets! One of the things that I find crucial to my sanity is the ability to switch things off. Even now as I write, I've got the email closed and have signed out of Messenger - useful as they are, these things are likely to distract me from my writing.
Yes, writing has to be near the top of my list - being creative is something you can fully immerse yourself in, so much so that I've been known at times to forget about supper because I was so immersed in a story. And I expect people who are creative in other ways - painting or sculpture or whatever - probably experience the same thing, total immersion in what you are creating.
Praying can sometimes do that for me - not always, because often I am very distracted, but now and again there are these special moments when I am totally and wonderfully aware of God's presence, and nothing else matters, there's just me and him and total bliss. Even better than making love - which of course is another opportunity for totally immersing yourself in the moment and forgetting about the boring and mundane elements of life.
And then there are those little moments that are on offer but so often we don't feel we have the time to really enjoy, like watching a rainbow or a butterfly, or pausing to cuddle a cat. Children are so much better at this - somehow we lose it as we grow up and allow ourselves to become more and more burdened with To Do lists. But the choice is still there - seeing the neighbour's cat in our back garden when I go out with the rubbish, I could tell myself I've got a zillion things to do, or I could stop for a minute and really enjoy stroking the cat. I find if I allow myself that moment of pure delight, I then have much more energy to tackle my To Do list afterwards.
I'm not going to try and compete with his suggestion of surfing, as risk-taking just isn't the way I get my buzz, though I can see how a feeling of danger can bring about a total focus on what's going on for you at that moment, I'm sure that facing a huge wave and concentrating on survival would mean you don't suddenly find yourself thinking about the shopping list or the person you were supposed to be phoning or the report for the boss. But there are other ways of getting that pure focus. (Actually, I was surprised to find a man asking about this - my impression has been that men are much better than us at focusing on whatever they're doing and forgetting about everything else, whilst women tend to juggle lots more different activities and are not so good at shutting out the world and its distractions, which is probably the way we're programmed so that we could be good mothers. Babies wouldn't survive very well if their mothers were too good at focusing on what they're doing to the exclusion of everything else.)
But the question was about ways of being fully present in the moment, which is, as he says, quite rare these days as people tend to rush around so much - the developments of technology, instead of those optimistic fantasies of a life of leisure which I remember reading about in sci-fi when I was young, have brought us more pressure, higher expectations, and much less peace and quiet. To be able to focus on the moment these days you need to switch off a huge number of gadgets! One of the things that I find crucial to my sanity is the ability to switch things off. Even now as I write, I've got the email closed and have signed out of Messenger - useful as they are, these things are likely to distract me from my writing.
Yes, writing has to be near the top of my list - being creative is something you can fully immerse yourself in, so much so that I've been known at times to forget about supper because I was so immersed in a story. And I expect people who are creative in other ways - painting or sculpture or whatever - probably experience the same thing, total immersion in what you are creating.
Praying can sometimes do that for me - not always, because often I am very distracted, but now and again there are these special moments when I am totally and wonderfully aware of God's presence, and nothing else matters, there's just me and him and total bliss. Even better than making love - which of course is another opportunity for totally immersing yourself in the moment and forgetting about the boring and mundane elements of life.
And then there are those little moments that are on offer but so often we don't feel we have the time to really enjoy, like watching a rainbow or a butterfly, or pausing to cuddle a cat. Children are so much better at this - somehow we lose it as we grow up and allow ourselves to become more and more burdened with To Do lists. But the choice is still there - seeing the neighbour's cat in our back garden when I go out with the rubbish, I could tell myself I've got a zillion things to do, or I could stop for a minute and really enjoy stroking the cat. I find if I allow myself that moment of pure delight, I then have much more energy to tackle my To Do list afterwards.
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