present – Observations and Misunderstandings

To Wash Or To Dream

10/08/2020 Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I spoke the other day about being present when drinking your coffee or smoking your cigarette. Not only does it allow you to enjoy it more but the act of being present and the resulting benefits to body and mind are invaluable. Today I spent eight hours cleaning bread baskets. It’s not an overly taxing job as there’s a machine you put them in that does all the hard work but without doubt it is monotonous and you spend most of the day being painfully aware of the enormous pile that never seems to get any smaller. In times of monotony we have a habit, or at least I have a habit, of dreaming of adventures in foreign lands, things I would like to incorporate into my life or simply what I fancy eating for my dinner. Today was no different and while some may argue these are great chances to have a really good think about stuff, and there are credible arguments to suggest there is truth in that, it doesn’t allow for the exercise of being present in the moment if you’re living in fantasy land.

Buddhist monks have written, I know because I have seen it, that we should put as much attention into the most menial of tasks as we do the most important of tasks. If we are capable of this, when we really need to focus and be present for something, we are far more practised and it is far easier. That seems to make sense as it can be hard to switch things on and off. On top of that if we are living in fantasy land, or making plans as it’s commonly known, then we’re as far from being present as possible. That of course may not be the aim of life but it’s not a bad thing to try and incorporate a little.

But as I said fantasising can be fun and let’s be honest imagining you’ll be sailing in the sun of Greece soon or sitting on a Costa Rican beach probably trump being stuck away in the north-east of England in the corner of a bakery getting wet monotonously. It would be nice going to Costa Rica though, I’ve heard a great deal about it and it seems like a good place for me to rediscover my love of travel. Plans this year have been somewhat difficult with all these virus shenanigans. In someways it’s been good to break the habit of just disappearing on a foreign adventure the moment I fancy a change from whatever the norm is and knowing planning is pointless, has made me do far less of it which allows me to step out of my head a little more often. Is that a win, just maybe. Did it prevent me dreaming instead of meditatively focusing on each basket, well no of course it didn’t I’m not a Buddhist monk. Alas, one more time I become aware I am but a simple and fallible human.

A Momentary Coffee

09/08/2020 Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Have you ever got to the end of your coffee and realised you want more. That the desire you had for coffee hasn’t been satiated and you’re not satisfied. As you delve deeper into the thoughts of the moment, that you can actually barely remember drinking the coffee at all. If that is the case there’s a good chance you were also doing something else while drinking the coffee. Perhaps working on your laptop. Maybe drinking your coffee on a long road trip. Or even grabbing a quick sip while doing some gardening. Busy to such an extent we didn’t give even a momentary awareness to the thing we desired, merely hoping to absorb it’s energy induced benefits.

It can’t just be the need to fill the caffeine addicted desire that makes us crave the cup, there must be something else involved like experiencing the taste and the sensations that consuming it provide. If you drink your coffee while completing whatever task you are fulfilling then this lack of focus and awareness of the act of enjoying and appreciating the coffee will be missed and arguably while it may be in your body, you may as well have not even drunk the coffee at all.

You forgot to enjoy the moment you very nearly created, this lack of presence denies existence itself. I’ll have another please.

We live in a world that moves at such speeds that we often don’t allow ourselves the necessary pleasure of just stopping and taking that five minutes to really observe the coffee and appreciate the satiating joy it can provide. So busy we don’t even have five minutes. But we always have five minutes, no one is truly that busy. We just didn’t notice that we wasted that five minutes robotically doing something else. Facebook perhaps.

In the past when I smoked I would have similar realisations. You crave a cigarette but you desire the whole experience not just the nicotine. I would sometimes roll one ‘for the walk’ but while there was a different satisfaction from that version, you still ended up fancying another upon arrival at the destination. There was something that hadn’t been entirely fulfilling about that version of the cigarette, just as there is something lacking from the coffee you forget you’re drinking.

We are so full of distractions. Perhaps we can use things like coffee or cigarettes, both together even, to use as markers to just take that five minutes to bring awareness to our surroundings, thoughts and the moment we’re experiencing. Just five minutes, just the length of time it takes to drink the coffee. There’s thousands of years of wisdom on being present, it can’t all be worthless now we have smart phones.