Practicing being present. I started this piece last year and was thinking this week about how important it is to be present right now.
Carmel is a lovely upstate town.
Quiet, rural, much less suburban than many of its Westchester counterparts.
Or at least it was, back in the early ’80s, when my mother and I found ourselves on a train or bus — I can’t quite remember — to the home of my aunt Lillian. She was hosting a retreat for her fellow participants in “The Work”, a spiritual practice based on the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff. My parents met in a Gurdjieff meeting in the mid-1950s, and several of my father’s family members were also involved.
The pilgrimage to Carmel was, I’m sure, my mother’s way of introducing me to a spiritual practice as a young adult. Maybe she thought, “if not now, when?” Her efforts at rejoining the Russian Orthodox Church had not proved so successful. I think she and I, (age 16 at the time) were not prepared for a regular confession practice when she asked the priest at the local church about the requirements for returning parishioners.
I remember only a few odd details of the weekend at Carmel. There must have been meditation sessions, and walks in nature, and I do recall a very handsome, dark-haired man with a mustache, but that’s about it. Oddly, I can see my attire on our first day more than anything that was said or done during it. Perhaps I was holding on to the image of my white, two-piece peasant dress with dark, red embroidered flowers and brown cowboy boots because it was concrete, something solid, while my relationship with my mother was more of a mirage, a mystery that I was destined to try to solve for the rest of my life.
Carmel was the beginning of a long journey towards being present. In a few years I would be a very confused and unsure-of-myself freshman in college. I remember walking on the lawn from the gym and thinking that the ultimate message of The Work is to live in the moment. What a simple message, and one that solved so many problems. I didn’t have to worry about the impending paper, the massive reading, or my failing relationship with my mother. I could just ask myself what I was doing right now and focusing on this was, as it turned out, more than enough.
I regularly hear the admonition to take it “one day at a time”; but what if one day is overwhelming? Towards the end of her life, when my mother was ill and I was a parent of young children, I remember occasionally feeling completely incapable of taking on the day. One afternoon I was exhaustedly climbing the subway steps to pick up the girls at school and wondering whether I would make it to the top. That’s when it hit me: I didn’t need to take on the day; I just needed to make it to the top of the subway steps. If one day at a time didn’t work, perhaps five minutes at a time would.
The other lesson I learned at Carmel was how to develope a daily gratitude practice. It took a long time to come to fruition and it wasn’t until I had children of my own that it truly dawned on me: as I looked at my young daughters, I realized I couldn’t ask for more. I had everything I needed. My family was healthy, we had a roof over our heads, clean water, and enough food to eat. How many people in the world can say that?
These days, I am taking small comfort in the gift of being present. I believe it was Eleanor Roosevelt who said “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.”