Be Here!

I had a very strange and ironic situation happen to me recently. I was attending a webinar on how to be more productive and some of the basic points of the presentation were to be more mindful and use various tools to help you stay focused.  The irony of the situation was, I was totally distracted and unfocused while the webinar was happening.  A webinar on focus, and I wasn’t even focused on it!

I suspect I am not alone in my confession.  How often have you been in a meeting or at dinner with family and friends and your mind is somewhere entirely different than Right Here? I think this is just the nature of the beast in our world, with all of the ways it pulls for our time and attention. And while it would be tempting to just toss my hands up in the air and say, “oh well!” it seems like there might be an invitation for us to lean in and grow here.

What if we could see all of that distraction and our lack of focus as an invitation to just Be Here as much as possible? To continue to learn how to be present in this moment, with these people, in this situation, without our minds and hearts wandering back toward the past or forward toward the future?

I have a friend who told me that one of the tools she uses to help her Be Here is to take her hands and spread them out with her arms open wide. Then she slowly brings her hands together until they are touching right in front of her. She thinks of it as reaching with one hand toward all the places in the past her mind is wandering, and reaching with the other hand toward the future and all her “what if’s” her mind is envisioning, and she just let’s those fade as she draws herself back to the present. It’s a simple gesture for her to Be Here. 

I’m getting ready to do some traveling in the coming weeks. The plan is to be with lots of family and friends and people I deeply love. I am also going to be exploring some new places in the world. Honestly, I am afraid that I may fall into the trap of allowing things like my phone with all of its notifications and distractions, to pull me out of Being Here. As a result, I think I am writing this message this week mainly to remind myself that I want to just Be Here for the next few weeks (and hopefully beyond). I want to allow myself the joy and beauty of enjoying these moments with these people and see if I can just focus on Being Here!

How about you? Where are you most tempted to lose your focus and drift away? Do you tend to go backwards to the past, or do you wander forward into the future and all the what if’s? What kind of tool would be helpful to bringing you back to Right Here? 

Here’s to doing our best to just Be Here this week (and beyond)!\

Be Well,

Stephen

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