In The Thick Of It

A story about presence

I don’t write about my kids very often. Mainly because I write after they’ve gone to bed, and during that time of quiet respite I like escaping to another headspace. But with parenthood always humming in the back of my mind, it’s ultimately inescapable, influencing just about everything I do. Thankfully, much of what I’ve picked up being a father applies far beyond raising kids.

Number one on the list: presence.

The other day I was sitting on the couch, messing around on my phone. My four-year-old wanted to play. I’m sure I muttered some answer. So, the boy jumped on me, and in one swift and surprisingly  graceful motion, he kicked me in the nuts, pulled my hair, and head butted me in the face.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a violent reminder to get your head in the game. Kids have their ways of willing the presence out of you—and they often get it, whether you’re looking to provide or not. If only other pursuits employed such assertive methods.

This writing gig, for one, requires presence two times over: presence during the act of actually putting words on the page, and also presence throughout the day: noticing details, how people walk and talk with each other, how the light changes across the street in the afternoons, how it feels to be in a marriage, and all of the other things you must put into a story to make it feel real.

But in this world, there are armies of ulterior motives fighting for our presence, undermining our efforts to put that energy toward pursuits which might lack that alluring sense of instant gratification, but which would be more meaningful in the long run (e.g. relationships, experiences, making art, etc. etc. etc.).

David Sedaris has a great line in his book Calypso about his friends bringing their three kids over for dinner: when they leave he has the feeling his whole being has been violated. David Sedaris, it should be noted, has no children. I do—and I often feel the same way.

But perhaps a bit of violation is necessary. If it’s against the sanctity of our ability to stray off course / procrastinate / generally fuck off when we’d be better off paying attention, then I’d say that violation is warranted. If I’m sleeping through life, I’ll take some cold water to the face.

Because a lack of presence doesn’t just drop you at a neutral baseline.

My temper, for instance, is directly correlated with my presence. If I’m preoccupied, my mind elsewhere, thinking about something that ought to be done, my patience gets thin—I notice it with the kids—but when my mind is quiet, I can play for hours without thinking about being anywhere else.

Of course, focusing on presence is easier said than done. You wouldn’t have yoga and meditation if it were. But in this time of always on, with emails and texts arriving at all times, and the increasingly dissolving boundaries between business / pleasure, it seems harder than ever to eliminate the distractions.

This goes for both those with and without kids. We’re all dealing with plenty of life—and life is hard however you slice it. As Mark Manson puts it in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck: “Everyone has problems. Single people have single people problems. Married people have married people problems. Poor people have poor people problems, and rich people have rich people problems.”

As a political science professor of mine liked to say, choose your solutions, choose your problems.

I think it’s fair to say that our modern culture is exacerbating these issues, wholesale, regardless of our specific problems. Since I have willingly chosen those parenthood problems, I would like to share two recently learned facts:

1. The majority of states have laws saying puppies must not be separated from their mothers before eight weeks of age.

2. Daycare centers licensed for infants will take children as young as six weeks.

Take that information at face value: these things are on the books. But I’ll tell you how I interpret it: we live in a society that recognizes the importance of keeping puppies with their mothers, but doesn’t afford that same respect to its own citizens. Exemplifying, in one specific way, how our society is generally set up for anti-presence.

Things pull at our attention from every direction. Utter distraction. A phone constantly buzzing in our pockets. Newer, better, faster products we must purchase. A hundred alternate lifestyles we could be living: minimalist, maximalist, digitally nomadic. And, of course, making money to finance all of it.

A distracted mind is advantageous to many interests, with the notable exception of our own self-interest. Because attention is a zero-sum game—as we dilute our attention with distraction, hardly any is left for the present moment.

Ram Dass, the famed spiritual philosopher, once commanded: BE HERE NOW. It’s a simple task. But like most simple things, pulling it off is a tall order.

So, here’s to this moment, right now (and it headbutting you into the present, metaphorically speaking).

-Martin