Tag: life

The Present Moment

Where Understanding Becomes A Life

We spend surprisingly little of our lives anywhere other than the present. That statement sounds obvious. Physically, where else could we be? And yet our attention can spend enormous amounts of time somewhere else. We revisit conversations that have already happened. We replay mistakes. We remember people who are gone. We imagine different versions of choices we already made. At the other end, we anticipate what might happen tomorrow, next month or ten years from now. We plan, worry, hope, prepare and imagine.

None of those things are inherently problems. The past contains experience. The future gives us direction. But neither is where we live. Everything we have ever actually done has happened in a present moment. That makes the present considerably more important than simply being the space between yesterday and tomorrow. It is where everything eventually has to become real.

The Past Is Something We Can Learn From

Looking backward has value. Our experiences contain information. If we want to understand ourselves, we often have to examine where we’ve been. What happened? What did we do? What did we feel? What choices worked? Which ones didn’t? What patterns are repeated? What did an experience teach us that we couldn’t have understood before living through it? Reflection allows experience to become knowledge.

But there is a difference between returning to the past to retrieve something and continuing to live there after we’ve retrieved it. We cannot change what happened. We may change our understanding of it. We may repair consequences that still exist. We may grieve it, learn from it, forgive something, refuse to forgive something, accept it, reinterpret it or discover years later that we misunderstood part of it. But eventually whatever we discover has to come back with us. Otherwise reflection becomes repetition. We keep visiting the same room without bringing anything useful out of it.

The Future Gives Us Somewhere To Go

The future serves a different purpose. We need the ability to look ahead. Goals require it. Planning requires it. Responsibility requires it. If we want to become something different from what we currently are, we need some ability to imagine what that difference might look like.

But the future presents its own trap. We can become so concerned with where we’re going that the present becomes nothing more than an obstacle between ourselves and the life we imagine having later. We’ll be satisfied when we achieve the goal. We’ll relax when the problem is solved. We’ll appreciate ourselves when we’ve changed enough. We’ll enjoy life when circumstances improve. There is always another condition. And because the future continually becomes the present when it arrives, we can spend an entire life waiting for a moment in which we finally allow ourselves to live.

Non-Attachment Doesn’t Keep Us From Caring

This is one place where my understanding of non-attachment becomes useful. Non-attachment does not require us to become indifferent to the past or unconcerned with the future. We can treasure what happened without requiring it to still be happening. We can work toward something tomorrow without requiring tomorrow to unfold exactly as we imagined. We can love what is currently in our lives while understanding that its presence is not guaranteed forever.

That includes people. Circumstances. Bodies. Careers. Possessions. Identities. Even the version of ourselves standing here today. Everything changes. The present moment asks us to participate fully in what exists without confusing appreciation with permanent possession. That can make appreciation stronger rather than weaker. When we stop assuming something will always be available, we may finally begin noticing that it is available now.

Perspective Requires Movement

There is another reason the present matters within personal development. Sometimes we need to leave our ordinary perspective. We may need to descend. That can mean examining pain, memory, fear, emotional patterns, unconscious motives or parts of ourselves we would rather avoid. There are things we cannot understand from the surface.

At other times we need to move in the opposite direction. We need distance. We need a higher vantage point. We need to step back far enough to see the larger pattern. A problem that consumes our entire field of vision from one position may look very different when viewed as one event within a year, a decade, a relationship, a developmental process or an entire life. Both movements can be valuable.

Depth gives us information that the surface can hide. Perspective gives us relationships that proximity can hide. But neither movement completes the process. Eventually we have to come back.

The Present Is The Ground We Return To

This return is something I consider essential. There is little developmental value in discovering profound things about ourselves if those discoveries never alter the way we live. We can understand why we become angry. Then someone irritates us today. What do we do? We can understand our attachment patterns. Then we face the possibility of losing something important. What do we do? We can develop elaborate philosophies about compassion. Then somebody difficult is standing directly in front of us. What do we do? We can understand boundaries intellectually. Then someone crosses one. What do we do?

This is where development stops being theoretical. The present moment is where understanding encounters circumstance. It is where knowledge becomes choice. Where values become behavior. Where intention becomes action. Where philosophy encounters consequence. Where the person we believe ourselves to be meets the person we actually demonstrate ourselves to be.

Insight Has To Survive Contact With Life

It is relatively easy to understand ourselves while sitting alone thinking about ourselves. Life provides the test. We return from reflection with an idea about ourselves, and then circumstances give us opportunities to see whether it holds. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we discover that we aren’t as patient as we believed. Or as independent. Or as compassionate. Or as disciplined.

Sometimes the opposite happens. We discover that something which once controlled us no longer does. A situation that would once have overwhelmed us becomes manageable. A boundary we once couldn’t maintain becomes natural. A decision that once required enormous effort becomes simply what we do. Those moments matter because development has moved from understanding into embodiment. We aren’t merely thinking differently. We are living differently.

The Present Is Also Where Small Things Accumulate

We tend to notice dramatic transformations. Life is often built through much smaller ones. One workout. One conversation. One refusal. One apology. One hour spent learning. One decision not to repeat an old behavior. One moment in which we notice what we’re doing and choose differently. None may appear particularly significant by itself. But our lives are composed of these moments.

A goal may exist months away. The behavior that reaches it happens today. A relationship may develop over years. The relationship is being created through the interaction happening now. Character may seem like something enormous and abstract. Much of it is simply the accumulation of choices made when circumstances repeatedly ask us who we’re going to be. The present is where those answers are given.

We Don’t Have To Trap Ourselves In The Present Either

There is a strange contradiction that can occur when people begin emphasizing present-moment awareness. Even being present can become another rigid rule. We don’t need to stop remembering. We don’t need to stop planning. We don’t need to eliminate imagination, anticipation, reflection or concern. The ability to mentally move through time is useful.

The question is whether we know why we’re going somewhere and whether we know how to return. We can visit the past to learn. We can look toward the future to orient ourselves.  We can descend to understand what lies beneath us. We can rise above a situation to gain perspective. But eventually our feet have to touch the ground again. Because this is where our life is waiting.

Every Moment Matters

Perhaps one of the simplest developmental questions we can ask is: What am I doing with what I know right now? Not, what did I once understand? Not, what do I intend to become someday? What am I doing with it now? If we’ve learned something from the past, where is it visible in our present behavior? If we have a goal for the future, what are we doing today that moves toward it? If we’ve gained a new perspective, how does it change the way we interact with what is directly in front of us? If we’ve discovered something within ourselves, what does that discovery actually change? And if something matters to us, are we appreciating its presence while it is still here? We cannot remain in a single moment. Even the moment in which these words are being read is already passing. That doesn’t make the present meaningless. It makes it valuable.

The past gives us experience. The future gives us possibility. Depth can give us understanding. Perspective can give us a wider view. But the present is where all of them meet. It is where we choose. It is where we act. It is where we experience the people and things we claim to value. And it is where everything we have learned eventually has to become part of the life we are actually living.

We can look backward. We can look forward. We can look inward. We can look outward and above. But sooner or later, personal development asks us to return our attention to the ground beneath our feet and answer a much more immediate question: Now that we can see more clearly, what are we going to do with where we are?

Learning To See Yourself

Observation Without Immediate Judgement

One of the hardest things we can learn to do for ourselves is how to look without immediately deciding what we are looking at. That sounds simple. It isn’t. We observe ourselves constantly, but observation and interpretation are not the same thing. Something happens. We experience an emotion, make a decision, react to another person, succeed at something, fail at something, or find ourselves repeating a familiar pattern.

Almost immediately, our minds begin explaining. I did that because… They did that because… This means… That’s just the kind of person I am. Sometimes the explanation is correct. Sometimes it contains part of the truth. Sometimes it is completely wrong. The problem isn’t interpretation. Interpretation is necessary if we want to understand anything. The problem is reaching an interpretation so quickly that we stop observing.

Learning To Look

A significant part of my own approach to personal development has involved learning to separate what I observe from what I believe those observations mean. That distinction gives us somewhere to begin. What actually happened? What did we think? What did we feel? What did we do? What were we expecting? What did we want? What were we afraid of? What happened afterward? These questions are different from immediately asking whether we were good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified. Those judgments may have their place. But first, we need to see what happened.

There is an important reason for this. Once we become emotionally invested in an explanation, we tend to begin looking for evidence that supports it. New experiences are interpreted through conclusions we’ve already formed. We can become remarkably good at proving things to ourselves. That doesn’t necessarily make those things true.

Observation Is Not Passivity

Observing without immediate judgment does not mean refusing to make judgments. It doesn’t mean everything is acceptable. It doesn’t mean right and wrong don’t exist. And it certainly doesn’t mean endlessly analyzing ourselves while refusing to make decisions. It means allowing observation to come before conclusion.

In my own experience, intuition often functions this way. Something catches my attention. A behavior repeats. Something feels significant. Two apparently unrelated experiences begin to resemble one another. The message, as I have learned to treat it, is essentially: Pay attention to this. That is very different from: This is what it means.

We can apply the same distinction whether or not we describe the initial recognition as intuition. Something has caught our attention. Fine. Now we look. An observation can become a question. The question produces possibilities. Those possibilities can become hypotheses. Life then gives us opportunities to test them. Observe. Reflect. Recognize a pattern. Form an idea about what that pattern might mean. Test it. See what happens. Integrate what survives. Then return and observe again. The process is recursive because understanding ourselves changes the person doing the observing. We don’t return to exactly the same starting point.

We Are Both Observer And Observed

There is an obvious difficulty in self-observation: The person performing the experiment is also the experiment. We bring our memories with us. Our desires. Our fears. Our wounds. Our expectations. Our beliefs. Our previous conclusions. We cannot simply remove ourselves from ourselves and become perfectly objective observers. But perfect objectivity isn’t required. What we can do is become increasingly aware of the lenses through which we are looking.

Suppose someone says something that makes us angry. Our first observation might simply be: I became angry. Before deciding what the anger proves, we can become curious about it. What exactly triggered the anger? Was it what the person said? How they said it? What we believed they meant? What we expected them to say next? Was the anger entirely about what happened today? Did the interaction resemble something older? Were we defending a principle? Protecting a boundary? Defending our pride? Were we frightened? Embarrassed? Exhausted? There may be more than one answer. Human beings are complicated enough to have several motives, emotions and interpretations operating simultaneously.

The purpose isn’t to interrogate ourselves until every emotion disappears. The purpose is to understand enough about the machinery producing our response that we have more choice in what happens next.

Motives Matter

Behavior tells us something. Motive tells us something else. Two people can perform exactly the same action for completely different reasons. The same is true within ourselves. We can help someone because we genuinely care about them. We can help because we want to feel needed. We can help because we’re afraid they’ll leave if we don’t. We can help because helping them benefits us. And sometimes several of those motives can exist at once. Human motives are not obligated to be simple. That is why honest self-observation eventually requires something more difficult than merely noticing our behavior.

We have to become willing to ask: Why am I doing this? And then we have to become willing to discover that our first answer may not be our deepest one. This is also where immediate judgment can interfere with discovery. If we punish ourselves every time we uncover an unattractive motive, we create an incentive to stop looking for unattractive motives. We begin protecting ourselves from our own observations. That isn’t greater self-awareness. It is teaching ourselves what not to see.

Learning To Use The Mirror

I frequently use the mirror as a model for personal development because there is something useful about what a mirror does. A mirror does not need to approve of our reflection. It simply allows us to see it. What we do with that information comes afterward. We may dislike what we see. We may appreciate it. We may decide something needs to change. We may discover that something we’ve spent years trying to change never needed changing in the first place. But before any of those decisions become useful, we have to be willing to look.

And looking becomes considerably harder when identity becomes involved. If we need to believe that we are always compassionate, we may have difficulty recognizing our capacity for cruelty. If we need to believe that we are strong, we may have difficulty seeing our fear. If we identify completely with independence, we may have difficulty recognizing where we have become dependent. The opposite can be equally distorting. If we have decided that we are weak, broken, selfish or incapable, we may reinterpret evidence of strength, development or generosity so that it continues supporting the identity we’ve already accepted. Positive and negative self-images can both distort the mirror. The question isn’t whether we should have an identity. The question is whether our identity remains capable of receiving new information.

Patterns Require Time

One observation tells us that something happened once. It does not necessarily tell us why. Repeated observations begin to reveal patterns. That is why I place considerable value on looking at ourselves longitudinally—across time rather than only through the intensity of a particular moment. What happens repeatedly? Under what conditions? What changes it? What makes it stronger? What makes it disappear? What happens when we deliberately respond differently? Now self-observation begins turning into experimentation. If we believe a particular behavior comes from a particular motive, we can change something and observe whether the pattern changes.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the result reveals that our explanation was incomplete. That isn’t necessarily failure. We learned something. And that new information becomes part of the next observation.

Other People Are Mirrors Too

We don’t learn about ourselves exclusively by sitting alone and thinking. Other people provide information. Relationships provide information. Conflict provides information. Success and failure provide information. The way we behave when frightened may show us something that peaceful reflection never could. The way we behave when given authority may reveal something that powerlessness could not. The way we respond to rejection, affection, responsibility, criticism, praise, loss or opportunity may expose parts of ourselves that were invisible under different conditions.

Other people’s perceptions can also provide useful information. But they remain observations from another position. Someone else’s interpretation of us should not automatically become our identity any more than our first interpretation of ourselves should automatically become truth. We can listen. We can compare. We can test. We can look for repetition. We can ask whether the reflection contains something we couldn’t see from where we were standing. The mirror provides information. We still have to decide what that information means.

We Are Allowed To Be Wrong About Ourselves

This may be one of the most useful permissions we can give ourselves. We are allowed to discover that something we believed about ourselves was wrong. We are allowed to discover that we misunderstood our motives. We are allowed to discover that something we once considered a strength has become a limitation. We are allowed to discover that something we considered a weakness contained a strength we hadn’t yet learned how to use. We are even allowed to discover that an understanding that was once accurate is no longer accurate because we have changed. Personal development requires the possibility of being surprised by ourselves. Otherwise, self-examination becomes little more than repeatedly confirming an identity we’ve already decided upon.

Seeing Creates Choice

The ultimate purpose of observation is not endless introspection. It is choice.

Things we cannot see can still influence us. Patterns we cannot recognize can still repeat. Motives we refuse to examine can still direct our behavior. The more clearly we can observe what is happening within us, the more opportunity we have to decide what we want to do with it. Sometimes we change what we find. Sometimes we accept it. Sometimes we strengthen it. Sometimes we redirect it. Sometimes we discover that the thing we were fighting was never actually the problem. And sometimes we simply gather more information because we don’t know enough yet. There is no requirement that every observation immediately become a conclusion. There is no requirement that every question immediately receive an answer.  Sometimes the most useful thing we can say is: I noticed this. I don’t know what it means yet. I’m going to keep looking. That leaves the door open. And if our purpose is genuinely to know ourselves rather than merely confirm what we already believe, that open door matters.

Personal development can begin in many places, but one of the simplest is also one of the hardest: Learn to look at yourself long enough to see what is actually there before deciding what it means. Then keep looking. Because the person looking into the mirror today is not necessarily the same person who will be standing there tomorrow.