The Gift of Presence

I’ll be 30 soon, and by now, I’ve wrestled with the tension of decisions. In your late 20’s there’s all sorts of things to consider and choose about your life: career directions, when to start a family, what to do with your mortgage, the best way to pay off loans, how to be an adult.

Despite popular opinion, more decisions don’t equal more happiness. In fact, according to psychologist Barry Schwartz, more choices can actually lead to more problems. In his book, the Paradox of Choice, Schwartz explores how too much of a good thing (e.g. more choices) can negatively affect our wellbeing. More choices can lead to more questioning about whether or not you made the “right” decision. And when certain decisions feel rather significant, it’s hard not to question yourself and what would have happened if you chose something different instead. The mind can easily get swept away in cycles of ruminating, wondering, second guessing, regretting.

This can go on and on, from the bigger decisions like marriage and grad school, to the smaller ones, like what you order at a restaurant or what to do with a free weekend. When you’re at the crossroads of numerous decisions all at once, the choices and “what-if’s” can become paralyzing.

Decisions themselves, to clarify, are a gift; they represent an exercise in free will. Without them, we would be robots enslaved to fatalism. Our individual choices allows for true beauty, goodness, and love to exist in the world. But often times, in our many decisions, we can get stuck in planning for the future, or thinking about the past.

This is where the gift of presence comes in. “Presence” here refers to a state of being where you are totally and completely emerged in the “now.” Here, there are no decisions to be made, no plans to think through, or no past choices to reconsider. There is only a moment by moment awareness of what is happening, right now.

As Eckhart Tolle would say, all we really have is the “now.” Nothing fundamentally exists, except everything that happens here in the present moment. Everything else is a memory of what happened, a wish for what could have happened, or a longing or fear of what will happen.

There is great freedom in the “now.” Freedom to experience life, just as it is, nothing more and nothing less. When you’ve been swimming in a sea of uncertainty for so long, the gift of presence loosens the bonds of decision fatigue and makes space for stillness.

And, ironically, the “best” decisions, I’ve come to find, tend to flow our of places of being fully present and aware. We may even come face to face with new opportunities or ways of living that we wouldn’t have noticed or experienced before.

The gift of presence frees us from a place of doing, controlling, or perfecting, and allows us, even if just for a moment, to simply be.