A Practice of Noticing — On Presence, Time and What We Miss

When my oldest son was in preschool, I found myself in the director's office, for reasons I no longer remember, because he was never one of the ones getting called in (not the case for all of them, lol). What I do remember is saying something to her about already feeling like I was missing things. Like the details were slipping through my fingers before I could really hold onto them. Like the fireflies in the night that I see, twinkling intermittently before they disappear farther and farther away from me. She was a good twenty-five years older than me, and she tilted her head in that way that older, wise mothers do. She looked me in the eyes and said in her soft discerning voice something like, you'll never catch all of it, that's just impossible, you're a human. It's a challenge to stay present in the ordinary and mundane of motherhood. Oh the ordinary and mundane. And especially in the moments that don't feel like they count. She followed with, by the way, that's a lot of it.

I remember walking out of her office and naively thinking to myself in kind of a smug way, oh, I've got that. I did not have that. Nor do I have it now. And I'm still coming to grips with that, and with the being human part. That's a lifelong endeavor I suppose (insert sigh).

The thing about staying present and noticing is that it sounds simple until you try to actually do it. We live in a world that is extraordinarily good at pulling our attention somewhere else. It's constant and relentless, or I find it to be. Somewhere more urgent, more productive, more optimized, more hurried. And so we show up halfway to our own lives, one foot in and one foot out. We're present enough to function, distracted enough to miss the real texture of it. It's not on purpose either, and it's definitely not a personal failing, it's just the pool we're all swimming in and the nature of being human.

And I want to be clear that I don't think we're meant to be present all the time. Sometimes disappearing into something mindless is exactly what's in order. Sometimes we need to zone out, recover and rest. The goal isn't constant presence, it's more like the returning to presence, imperfectly and repeatedly, when it matters. What we often end up missing when we can't find our way back to paying attention is so many of the beautiful and magical details. The way the light shimmers through the window at a particular time of day and then shifts just ever so slightly. The sound of one of my boys full out belly laughing, the specific laugh from when they were seven, that you'll swear you'll never forget and then one day realize you're already reaching for it… and they're off to college. An otherwise ordinary Thursday that you didn't know you'd wanted to remember. I've always said, time is a thief like that.

This is one of those thoughts I’ve never been able to escape or reconcile. The construct of time and its relationship to presence. Not in a tired self-help way or in a productivity hack way, but in an ongoing reckoning with what it actually means to be here in this life right now. In my body, in the room, with the people I love, with myself. Here as a mortal being. Definitely not in a perfect, 100% of the time way either, because as she said, that's just impossible, you're human. And the pressure to be perpetually present is its own kind of distraction.

I'm a psychotherapist, which means I've had the honor of sitting with people in some of their most human moments. The grief, the transitions, the reckonings that don’t always make sense. The moments when someone realizes they've been living slightly outside of their own life without being aware of how they got there. I've sat with all of that, and I've also been simultaneously figuring out how to do this myself (why the therapist goes to therapy), which I have not mastered and have zero illusions that I ever will. What I've come to understand, both in the therapy room and in my own life, is that noticing isn't a talent some people have and others don't. It's a practice and an intention. It requires a certain willingness to be with what's actually here rather than what you think should be here, without judgment, without the pressure to make it into something more meaningful or acceptable than it is. Sometimes what's here is stunningly beautiful and sometimes it's painfully boring. Other times, it's both at once. The practice isn't about extracting the most from every moment or carpe dieming to death your every day. It's more like showing up with a little more openness to whatever the moment actually holds and then letting it be just that, enough.

All of this got me thinking about whether I could make something small around exactly that, the coming back to presence, the noticing, the imperfect returning to yourself and your own life. Something that I can share with others. So I did just that. It's called A Practice of Noticing and it's not a course or a fix or a miracle. I wish that existed with a money back guarantee by the way. It's just five intentional days, each one short. Each day opens with an image from my studio, something I made or noticed or was sitting with. There's a few minutes of audio, just me thinking out loud about presence and attention and what gets in the way of both. And then a simple invitation to notice something, whatever's right in front of you, without trying to turn it into anything. I made it because I needed it. And I'm guessing I'm not the only one who might. Maybe we practice it together, imperfectly, the way we do everything else that actually matters in life.

If this resonates with you, you can find it [here].

xx,

Michel