I've spent a lot of words, in this space, talking about grief. About how it moves through us, what it asks of us, how it deepens us if we let it. I've said before that grief is unexpressed joy - that the ache we feel in loss is proportional to the love we were lucky enough to have. That insight has held up under everything I've thrown at it.
But lately I've been sitting with the other side of that equation. If grief is what joy looks like when it has nowhere left to go, then presence is what joy looks like when it's still here. Still available. Still asking to be felt, right now, before it becomes something we only access in retrospect.
This is harder than it sounds. I am, by training and temperament, someone who lives ahead of the moment - planning the next pastoral visit, the next coaching call, the next season. And I am, by circumstance, someone whose household is mid-threshold: a daughter about to leave for a life of her own, a body asking for different care than it used to need, a business taking shape one contract at a time. There is a pull, in seasons like this, to keep one foot already in the next chapter. To love the present loosely, as a kind of insurance against how much it will hurt to lose it.
But that's a trade I don't want to make. Because the things I'd be protecting myself from feeling now are exactly the things I'll grieve later - and grief, when it finally arrives, doesn't give back what presence withheld. It only confirms what was always true: this mattered. This was good. I was here for it, or I wasn't.
So I've been practicing something simple and not at all easy: staying in the room I'm actually in. Tasting the meal instead of planning the next one. Hearing my daughter's voice instead of already missing it. Letting a Tuesday be a whole Tuesday, not just scaffolding for some better day ahead.
This isn't about gratitude journals or forcing gladness. It's closer to what I do in Healing Touch work - a kind of attentiveness that doesn't try to fix or hurry the moment, just meets it. Hands resting on what's true right now. Most of what we call "being present" is really just refusing to abandon the now in favor of the next.
If grief is the receipt joy leaves behind, presence is the chance to actually spend what we have before it's gone. I don't think we get to skip grief by being present - loss still comes for everyone. But I do think we get to choose whether we lived fully in the meantime, or just managed to survive it while waiting for something else.
I'm trying, this season, to choose the first one. One ordinary, unrepeatable day at a time.
A Small Practice
If you want to try this with me, here's a simple way in - no journal required, no major life overhaul, just a few moments of attention reclaimed from the future.
Name one ordinary thing, out loud or in your mind, before it ends. Not the milestones - those announce themselves. The unremarkable ones: the specific way the light comes through the kitchen window at 7am, the sound of someone you love moving around in another room, the particular weight of a Tuesday with nothing dramatic in it. Say to yourself, this is happening now, and I am here for it.
Notice when you've already left. Several times a day, check in: am I actually in this conversation, this meal, this drive - or am I three steps ahead, already managing what comes next? This isn't a judgment, just information. Awareness alone starts to loosen the grip.
Let your hands tell the truth your mind keeps skipping past. This is something I rely on in Healing Touch work, but it translates anywhere: place a hand on your own chest, or on the surface of whatever you're doing - the steering wheel, the kitchen counter, someone's shoulder - and let that contact be the anchor. The body doesn't live in next week. It only knows now.
At the end of the day, ask one question instead of making a list. Not "what did I accomplish," but "what did I actually notice today?" If the answer is thin, that's not a failure - it's just a nudge to look a little closer tomorrow.
None of this prevents grief from eventually arriving. It isn't meant to. It's meant to make sure that when grief does come, it's grieving something we were truly present for - not something we were too busy outrunning to actually live.
No comments:
Post a Comment