Somebody told us this years ago and it stuck. Be where your feet are.
Not where your feet were. Not where they are going next week. Where they ARE, right now, actually touching the floor.
It sounds like a fridge magnet. It is the hardest thing on this whole list.
The math of a normal Tuesday
You are at dinner with people you love. Your body is at the table.
Where is the rest of you??
Re-reading a text you sent this morning. ✅
Rehearsing something you have to say on Thursday. ✅
Halfway through an argument from 2019 that you have still not won. ✅
Meanwhile there are actual humans in front of you saying actual things, and you are catching maybe sixty percent of it.
What it actually looks like
It is smaller than people make it sound. It is not a meditation retreat and it is not an app.
Feet on the floor. Check.
Notice five things in the room. Check.
Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Check.
Put the phone somewhere that is not your hand. Check.
That is a full practice. It takes about forty seconds and you can do it in a grocery store parking lot.
One thing we want to be careful about
You will see a version of this idea going around that says the past is depression and the future is anxiety.
We get why people like it. It is tidy!! And it is genuinely useful as a description of what worry and rumination FEEL like from the inside.
But we want to be careful with it, because depression and anxiety are illnesses, not a failure to stand in the right spot in time. Plenty of people do everything right. They stay present, they take the walk, they breathe out longer than they breathe in, and they are still sick, because that is what an illness is.
So take the practice. It helps. It has helped us.
Just do not hand it to somebody who is drowning like it is a life jacket. And do not accept it from anybody who hands it to you that way either.
The part that actually matters
Here is the thing nobody tells you about being present.
The reason to do it is not productivity, or peace, or any of the stuff on the poster.
It is that the ordinary Tuesday you are only sixty percent at is, statistically, most of your life. Not the vacations. Not the big ones you take pictures of. The Tuesdays.
Be where your feet are and you get more of your own life back.
That is the whole pitch. 🖤