Choosing presence imperfectly
Like me, you can be a daydreamer and fidgety, distractible, prone to losing your thread mid-sentence, and still practise presence
Tucked away in my archives - well, crates on the garage shelves - are a couple of school reports from my time at an English boarding school in the late 1970s. Parents of kids today wouldn’t recognise them; they are small slips of paper, one for each subject, with comments handwritten with a fountain pen. They are a quaint reminder of another era in schooling.
There’s a certain thread running through my reports, along the lines of, “if young Mr Eedle spent less time staring out the window and more time devoted to his school work, he’d have better grades”.
I think I’ve always had a tendency to daydream. My mind jumps around a million miles an hour; I can be easily distracted, yet, conversely, I can also adopt tunnel vision for hours at a time on a single task to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve had to learn the hard way to find a mode of life somewhere in the middle. It’s why I like being on holiday:
“Staring out the window with no obligations or decisions pending other than where to eat dinner is, at least for me, a freeing experience. It allows your mind to wander, allowing random thoughts to fly around.”
One of my worst habits is planning my reply instead of listening. Or worse, allowing my mind to segue into a whole set of other worries or concerns, all the while someone is speaking to me.
Being present has come with difficulty. I’ve told myself in the past that I’ll be present for people when the conditions are right. When I’m less tired. When I’m interested in the conversation. When my mind isn’t churning through a zillion thoughts concurrently. That I’ll stop interrupting others.
The gap between not paying attention and a self-realisation you’ve wandered is what being present is all about. That moment when you realise you’ve been nodding along without absorbing a word - and your companions just see your eyes glaze as you drift away.
You should never consider catching yourself like this to be failure; it’s an opportunity.
Psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, who brought mindfulness into mainstream medicine, put it plainly:
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
The waves don’t stop. Your mind will wander mid-sentence. You’ll catch yourself interrupting. You’ll realise you’ve been staring at someone without actually seeing them.
The practice isn’t in achieving unbroken attention. It’s in the choosing to return. Again and again, without drama, without self-punishment, just noticing and coming back.
Some people seem naturally present. They maintain eye contact. They remember what you said last week. But when you look closer, what they’ve actually developed is a shorter gap. Not because they never leave, but because they’ve practised returning so many times that the route back has become familiar.
Writer and meditation teacher Pema Chödrön describes this simply:
“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves is remaining ignorant by not having the courage to look at ourselves honestly.”
Looking honestly means acknowledging when you’ve left. Not as a character flaw. As information.
Like me, you can be a daydreamer and fidgety, distractible, prone to losing your thread mid-sentence, and still practise presence. Not in spite of these qualities, but with them. The practice doesn’t require you to become a different person first. It requires you to notice when you’ve wandered and choose to return, over and over, with enough gentleness that you don’t make it mean something terrible about yourself.
The gap between leaving and returning is where you actually live. Not in perfect attention. Not in finally arriving at some steady state of focus. But in the honest, repeated choice to come back to this moment after you’ve already left it.