The Power of Being Present
“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” — Lao Tzu
Have you ever wished you could be present again the way a child is? In this episode, I dive into the power of being present and strategies you can use to get in the moment.
CREDITS:
Podcast creator: Jordan Taylor
The video I use to practice my focus.
TRANSCRIPT:
My name is Jordan Taylor, and welcome to the If Then podcast. Our brains our a conglomerate of if/then statements, like in computer code, and oftentimes new lines of code are hard to write in our mind when we’re trying new things, for example if I want to play piano, then I need to read music. Sitting down and coding that particular if then statement could take years of dedication, but when we do sit down and create new then statements for a complicated if, it feels freaking amazing. This podcast is your weekly motivation, and mine, to get uncomfortable and write some neurological code.
“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
- Lao Tzu
*The sound of kids running*
It took all summer, but we had finally turned the yard to dust. It billowed from our steps and a football thrown, a car hood slammed with an incomplete end zone pass to the driveway. A dent was made, or was that already there? Dad would make the final call on that later. We huddled up. Neighbor against neighbor in a daily summer skirmish and there were no screens or beeps or past or future. There were just smiles and eyes and movement. And us, and the dust. The ball launched again, this time short and complete with a juke and shimmy and a two hand touch. Soon, the sun was quenched, and with it, our thirst as we downed water on the front porch watching the sunset. And we sat. We just sat and watched and talked and were together—in the moment. And we had no idea how valuable it was.
When I was a kid, there was only one thing—the moment. I had no past I could remember and my future was too far away to envision. I was there. Just right there with no distractions, just a sponge and a football soaking in every second and waiting, just waiting for the opportunity to squeeze out and apply its lessons, and then soak again. And then squeeze until the waters grew me, and then I found myself older with new kids on the field of life, bulky Past and weighty Future and with them, complex thoughts and distractions that thickened like a fog on the field as they blitzed and rushed me with the snap of the ball.
And then the game was sealed with a mid-game substitution from flip phone to smart. More foggy distractions, and I didn’t stand a chance. I was blitzed so fast, sacked so hard, and injured and then the game ended and those summers did too. “The moment” I knew so well, faded and was gone.
*music*
Have you ever just stopped and tried to be in the moment and not think? Like, really, just tried to think of nothing and just be present, with no external or internal stimuli affecting you— just solely focused on the now like a child? If you try this, you’ll notice something. Thoughts come to the front of your brain like waves on the beach. “I need to take out the trash, did I pay that bill, I wonder what she’s thinking of me, who’s that texting me?” You’ll see them come and then watch them dissipate as you observe them and choose not to engage as you continue to just sit and empty your mind again and then new ones emerge and dissipate from the psychological sand. And then new ones. You’re not thinking about them, you’re just observing them roll in and pull away. Roll in and away. It’s very weird. When you start to look at your thoughts objectively in this manner, you’ll notice that they don’t actually seem like they’re a part of you. They’re outside of you somehow. And you have a choice with each of them as you try to just be present and in the moment.
I started playing with this once I realized I had let my thoughts spiral out of control last summer. An unfortunate string of events exasperated by a phone addiction and the COVID response that brought a bought of insomnia that I had never experienced before. A new fear around something that had come so effortlessly my entire life: the basic human need for sleep. I’m still trying to understand the cause precisely, but I know one thing for sure. I was anywhere but there as I lay in bed.
See that summer, I had had an epiphany about my social standing within my family structure that turned my view of myself on its head. I found myself in a brand new role. It happened when I was designing and building a huge playground for my nephews with my older brother and Dad. Being the baby of the family, obviously, growing up this would have been a situation where I would be the one who was taking instruction and taking a back seat, doing as I was told. But now as I grew up and had practiced wood working for a few years at this point after having moved out from my parents and getting married, it was me who found myself in charge—planning and making tough final decisions and ordering what to do as my dad and brother looked to me for the final say, and that had never happened before. And for some reason, I don’t really know why, but that wrecked me. I all the sudden saw myself—how different I had become, and I didn’t recognize myself. Slowly over time I didn’t notice it happening I guess, but then working on that project with them, I could see my past self so clearly compared side-by-side to myself now. And it startled me awake at nights and then slowly moved to not being able to sleep at all as that summer progressed, and as unexpected things continued to occur.
My wife Sara and I picked up my Pop pop, soon after, from South Florida so he could come for a visit to Tennessee—an annual trip normally around my September birthday so he could experience the leaves with a changing season—a sight uncommon to his Florida eyes. When he opened the Ft. Lauderdale door, something was different. It was the first time I saw it in him. His age. His warm hug and familiar smile as we stretched our backs from the drive almost hid it, but there it was. 6 days later, when we got back to TN, as he sat in his favorite chair, watching his favorite show, it showed itself again, this time aggressively so. His breathing shallowed, and his large, grandfather hand grasped mine. It was all so sudden. Was this really happening? And we called. His heart slowed as the woman on the phone guided me through CPR, and I knew there was no point as I counted and pushed and tried, because Pop pop’s mission was complete: the great transfer of life. As I searched for his heart, I found it safely in mine, and then he was gone. And then the season changed. And I wasn’t ready.
Then, a couple weeks later, there was a knock at the door. Who could that be so late tonight? A man was heavily standing, and we knew—even before he asked if that was our dog in the road. Chance, my Great Pyrenees, had climbed the fence and was laying in the light of a truck all shook and I ran and picked him up and hurried home with him in my arms and he could barely move. And I knew. And the next day he was gone. And I wasn’t ready again.
All of this was magnified while in the midst of an unbearably stressful time of government restrictions and potential lockdowns and holidays canceled and abnormality and doom scrolling constantly to see when it would all just end, and I never had my eyes off my phone, and it never seemed to ever end. Would it ever be the same? Would it ever just stop?
And I couldn’t control my brain any more. I couldn’t be present any more. Too many situations all at once I was reacting to, and I couldn’t sleep for months. 2 hours of broken sleep a night with terror as the sun started rising revealing the casualties of yet another lost, wide-eyed battle. My brain was breaking. Any little thing would bring me to tears as thoughts of the past and unknown future haunted me. And I was on the couch with a blanket and a cell phone trying a new place for the third time and this was all so sudden as my brain kept spinning and spinning and reacting to the world and my phone, uncontrolled and just spinning. God, make it stop.
But what if this wasn’t all so sudden? What if this could have easily been predicted based on years of programmed behavior?
When I thought about it, as sleep started to return slowly but more consistently months later, as my brain naturally cooled off over time, I realized that this, indeed, wasn’t something random. In fact it was very predictable. This was a virus I had unwittingly and quietly coded in my brain for years and then, one summer, the intricate breadth of it’s web and intrusive structure was exposed all at once when there was more traffic than usual, and my brain utterly broke and the system crashed and went offline. To blame the surge in traffic seems logical at first which is good for me because in that scenario I have no responsibility—I’m not to blame. How could I control bad things happening after all? How could I control my thoughts towards them? But if I’m being honest, the surge in traffic just exasperated and exposed an already existing bug that I had personally been scripting for years.
This was revealed to me when I was reading a book that sleepless summer called “The 7 Habits for Highly Effective People,” a book my wife had bought me at the most timely of times, which I highly recommend. In his book, Stephen Covey talks about the concept of reacting to stimuli. He describes the difference between reactive and proactive people, and how in the reactive person there’s only one thing after a stimulus and that is an immediate response. There’s no middle step. The phone dings you, grab it. A harmful thought pops into your head, you ruminate and stew on it. In the proactive person, however, there is a middle step between stimulus and response, and this is the middle ground that makes us human, he argues. That middle step is the freedom to choose your response when a stimulus occurs. “Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us. In making such a choice, we become reactive. Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them. Proactive people are driven by values—carefully thought about, selected, and internalized.” (Covey 79)
Was I a reactive person or a proactive one? I honestly asked myself that night. Do I react quickly to stimuli without thinking or do I recognize my freedom—
*phone dings*
“Who’s that? Oh, right…”
*typing*
Or do I recognize my freedom to choo—
*phone rings*
Hello? Hey, yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow around 4 if that works? Okay sweet. See ya then.
*typing*
Oh, wait what’s this? What’s this article? Wait they did what? The U.S. plans to do what? You’ve got to be kidding me. Hhhhh…everything’s just so out of control these days. It’s like there’s not one sane leader in the entire world, it’s never going to feel like it used to, people have just given in too much to this stuff and now there’s no way to ever go back and my kids won’t know what the world used to be like… (keeps talking as the volume fades)
I think that we’re in one of the most reactionary times in human history. A stimulus happens, *ding* we respond, without a thought, no matter what we were doing or how important—hundreds, potentially thousands, of times a day. I mean, admit it, *ding* when you heard that sound, there’s a good chance your brain immediately lost focus. See, the main problem was that I had trained my brain to be solely reactionary. Every time I had an urge or trigger to pick up my phone, like when I woke up or went to the bathroom, or when someone left the room, I almost didn’t even feel a stimulus because it was so engrained in me that it was automatic. Everything in our current society is based around us willingly allowing others to control where our focus goes. Spinning the roulette wheel of a pull-to-refresh on Youtube as suggested videos appear like cards on the table to decide for us where our minds go. Algorithms curating which order to show you posts to hook you longer. Push notifications. Targeted ads. Suggested music on Spotify. That neurological path way to react was etched so deep in my brain, it was like a massive rushing electrical river to feed and sustain that reactionary cluster of cells, a thriving city at its mouth. Therefore, unsurprisingly, with this programming, it penetrated into other aspects of my life, not just notifications. If any thought popped into my head about anything, I had conditioned myself to respond and react. And then I was screwed, because as challenges arose in my progressively more complicated life, as suffering happened, I was a programmed slave to any and all thoughts that came into my head. I had deprogrammed focused thought and with it, the freedom to choose my response, out of my brain completely as the reactionary virus infected every single neuron, as that rushing river flooded and destroyed everything. And I was the hacker. I had no one else to blame.
To fix this, to have peace, to start being in the moment again and not reacting to every single thought that pulls you, the key is to learn how to focus, which despite what you might have been told, is a learned skill. And this is a good thing actually, because if you don’t have it currently you can take steps to gain it. Learn to focus, to focus on the present, because, if you think about it, it’s the only thing that really exists. The past isn’t here. And the future isn’t either. Like the classic verse in Matthew, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.“ Don’t spend energy worrying about the future or the past. All you have and are promised is right now, and right now is valuable. It’s what brings you peace. Learn to discard the waves of thoughts that appear on your neurologic sand that are harmful and useless to think about. Watch them, observe them on the beach. Choose which waves to surf on, and which are too violent and rough. That might seem impossible, so first, let me prove to you that focus is something that is actually easy to shift around. If I mention your toes right now, for example, your thoughts immediately go straight to your toes. If I mention your left ear, your thoughts shoot to your left ear. If I say think about the present, what does your focus shift to now? This might be a surprisingly difficult question to capture in words.
Go outside yourself and ask, “What am I actually doing right now?” For me, I’m typing on a computer, sitting on a couch motionless for about an hour. My feet are crossed in an easy way. I’m slightly hunched, head tilted to the left. I’m alone as the skylight beams down a shadow from the fan and it spins constantly in my peripheral vision. That’s what I’m really physically experiencing right now—even if I’m tricking myself into thinking that I’m somewhere else as my thoughts take me to places like the beach for example through this script. That is my physical location in space and time. And if I embrace that, my present moment, if I truly take the time to see things—to just see them and be with them more often, here now, as they are instead of through the fog of distractions and worries and a notification, if I notice them, the small things, like a child does, you can’t help but slow down, you can’t help but feel the freedom to choose start to appear as the world slows on its axis, people’s eyes appear. Their words mean more. The picture has color, and depths and hues, and color. And situations become more clear and the fog of distractions dissipates and you wonder at the world and see things. You see them again. You exist. It’s an entirely different way to exist, to view things. And that will slowly change you. And quickly change you too. You’ll feel calmer. You’ll be nicer. You won’t dislike yourself so much. And you’ll see.
I’m still trying to come up with a precise program to code into myself to learn to be in the moment. So far I’ve come up with 6 lines of the program that are really helping me currently:
Plan tomorrow morning.
Set out everything the night before that you want to do in the morning in order to make it easy on yourself to make the right decisions when you’re tired the next day. I’ve found that if I make good choices first thing in the morning, then I tend to have a more focused, present day. For me, I try to walk every morning, so I set out my clothes and shoes by the door the night before so that I can easily just put everything on without having to search in the dark and then make an excuse to not do it.
2. Make the first thing you look at in the morning something you’re proud of.
This thing you’re proud of preferably won’t be on your phone. For me, I have a personal mission statement that I read that helps me focus on what’s important to me. So that I can, again, start my day focused on who I want to be, here and now.
3. Exercise controlling your focus for 15 minutes.
Something that really helps me is to just sit alone for 15 minutes in the morning and just practice this exercise of focus. It’s one of the most difficult things I do all day, but one of the most beneficial. Watching my thoughts roll in and then watching them pull away. I try to focus on my immediate surroundings and my place in physical space and time and let everything else go. I sometimes follow a video that I’ll link to in the show notes that’s from a Christian perspective on this process.
4. The first interaction you have, be there.
When you have your first interaction with someone in the morning, really focus on them and the now. Don’t think about what they did yesterday that made you mad, or how you thinkthey’re going to act in the future. Think about them in this space and time, now. Cause that’s what exists. Deal with what’s in front of you. I did this the other day with my wife. When we talked in the morning, I really focused on our conversation and who she was in that moment, instead of who I imagined her to be. If my mind wandered—thinking about my podcast and my work day ahead, I would catch the thought, observe it, and shift back to her. Then, when it happened again as the urge to do the Wordle hit me—I saw the thought, and shifted again. I did this multiple times until I was honed in on her like a laser and what she was saying. I was in the moment, and it wasn’t as hard as I thought to deprogram my reactive habits. I even realized that being in the moment brought her peace. I could see her light up and open up to me more, when I always thought that it was her fault that she seemed distracted when we talked. Maybe it was me all along who was discouraging her from fully paying attention to us. And then I realized that I was appreciating her more than normal as we shared that synergistic moment together. And we were together. And we were experiencing that moment together. And then another. And then another.
5. Spend only an hour a day on your phone.
Studies clearly show that if you spend more than an hour a day scrolling your phone, that your mental state starts to dramatically decline. Just look at a graph between suicide rates and the launch of the iPhone, it’s startling. This is going to be hard, but for me, when I keep it to an hour, I just feel so much better.
6. Read something difficult every day.
Reading is a great way to train yourself to focus on the now. To force yourself from all distractions in order to understand complex ideas or characters in a book is remarkably beneficial for the mind. On days when I read, I noticed a massive difference in myself.
If you copy and paste this code into your mind tomorrow morning and follow it, you won’t be able to help seeing your life at least shift in the direction of being more present like a child. Of having more peace. Of having less worries than you had the day before. Of feeling like you’re one with the moment and the interactions and then the complexities start to fall away as you don’t deal with future potential problems that don’t exist, but deal with what’s right in front of you, and take it in stride with a clear, focused mind and the freedom to choose your response. And then the next day you’ll shift more, and then the next. And then the next.
So I’ll leave you with this:
“If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.”
- Lao Tzu
Thank you so much for listening to season 2 episode 3 of the If Then Podcast. If you have feedback you want to give me, I would love to hear from you over on my instagram @ifthenpodcast. I always respond. And if you would, leave me a 5 star review if you found this podcast valuable. It really helps the podcast to get seen by other people like yourself. We’re almost at 550 reviews on Spotify and 250 on Apple Podcasts. And, personally, my favorite part of the week is reading your reviews, like Whit who wrote, “I started listening a few days ago and I’m honestly hooked. I love how he story tells in his podcasts, using examples in his own life, and weaves what he learned throughout the story.“ Thanks, Whit. And don’t forget, for those of you who help me spread the word, I’ve been giving away 2 free 1 month Audible gift cards every week of Season 2. Last week, Ritchie and Erin won a free credit for an audiobook of their choice + access to their Plus catalog which includes thousands of audiobooks with no credits needed. All you have to do to enter to win is take a screenshot of this podcast and share it on your Instagram while tagging the account @ifthenpodcast in the post or story. Be sure to follow as well to know if you’re the winner this week. If you shared the last episode, you can also share this one too to be entered to win again. And if we get 200 shares by the end of season 2, each of you will be entered to win AirPods Max with an If Then Podcast engraving. We’re at 60 shares so far, so keep sharing! Thank you so much for listening, my name is Jordan Taylor, and what if/then will you write today?
