What does presence actually take?
The tagline at the top of this site is Presence, not pursuit. This thread is the working-out of what those words actually mean — for me, after years of chasing the next thing and finding myself less present, not more.
Presence isn’t a state you arrive at by trying harder; trying harder is the problem. Some of the pieces below are mine — what’s changed about my own attention as I’ve gotten older, what stillness looks like when I let it land, what acceptance has done to my happiness arithmetic. Others are field notes from movement conversations where the same lesson surfaces from radically different angles: standing practice that strips away every distraction, a Camino pilgrim told the meeting with herself comes first, a man recovering from a stroke whose anchor is just “this is what’s happening.”
The thread is sequenced for someone who’s tired of seeking and ready to notice.
This is enough
7 for Sunday — May 2025
The pivot. “I’ve spent my lifetime seeking: knowledge, control, achievement, clarity. Finally, I began to wonder—and have subsequently become convinced—that life is not about seeking. It’s about noticing what’s already here.” Open here, because the rest of the thread only makes sense if you’re willing to entertain that claim.
Sight
7 for Sunday — June 2025
A small practice in service of the same idea. Physical books on the side table, in sight, become a quiet design for future attention. “By intentionally placing physical books ‘in sight,’ I’m cultivating a point of view I hope will trigger ‘insight’ in my future self.” Presence isn’t only about what you do with this moment; it’s about what you set up for the next one.
The courage to wait
7 for Sunday — May 2025
What it actually feels like. “Rarely, but with increasing frequency, I find myself enjoying sitting perfectly still. Doing perfectly nothing. Paying attention to the moment instead of being completely obliterated by an endless torrent of thoughts.” The thought eventually arises that calls me back to doing — but I’ve started to wonder what would happen if instead I just kept waiting.
The first meeting
Movers Mindset Field Note — with Evelyn Higgins
Twelve days into walking the Camino, Evelyn heard a priest describe three meetings every pilgrim encounters. The order is the lesson: the meeting with yourself comes first. Not as the prize at the end of transformation, but as the prerequisite for everything that follows. Sustained, unavoidable simplicity surfaces what you’ve been avoiding.
When standing still is the hardest thing
Movers Mindset Field Note — with Nima King
Nima trained in Wing Chun and worked as a bouncer. When he finally got to Hong Kong to train with Grandmaster Chu Shong Tin, he expected sparring. He got hours of standing still in a small living room. “All these inner demons start to come up… there’s nowhere to hide.” The hardest practices aren’t the most external. They’re the ones that strip away the things you’ve been using to avoid being present with yourself.
Acceptance
7 for Sunday — June 2025
What acceptance does, mathematically. “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.” Not a sunny formula — Stoic joy isn’t suppression of feeling, it’s right relationship to what is. The meeting with reality, again.
When crisis brings clarity
Movers Mindset Field Note — with Rodrigo Pimentel
The extreme case. After a stroke that left him with double vision, slurred speech, and no fine motor control, what surfaced wasn’t despair — it was a phrase. “This is what’s happening.” Not “this shouldn’t be happening.” Not “this is unfair.” Just the honest naming of where you are, which turns out to be the only place from which anything can begin.
ɕ
#Mindfulness #Stoicism #Threads
