Trading ambition for presence

When I am going through a rough patch, I like to trade ambition for presence. When things are going well, it’s energizing to think about the future, to plan, to dream, to have ambition. But when things are hard, I find it helpful to center on the present and filter out the past and future, if only temporarily.

Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way talks about paying attention to now when there’s pain in the past and future. Presence includes both place and time. Place is here. Time is now. Paying attention to here and now means you are not fixated on past or future.

Movement toward the present is movement toward friends, toward offline, toward civic engagement, toward the earth, toward artist-brain. A similar expression I like is to “be where your feet are.” I picked this up as a sort of mantra among Baltimore Ravens players during press conferences and locker room interviews over the past couple seasons.