The Adventure

Reorientate yourself in the present. Refocus your attention on the objects around you and the phenomena you see outside your window. Be aware of the sensations you’re experiencing right now — the feeling of your body sitting on the chair, the clothes against your skin, your body’s tiredness or discomfort or warmth or cold.

The key phrase in this poem is “a gentle mental nudge.” Whenever you catch yourself in a state of absence, employing one of the strategies described above, give yourself a gentle mental nudge back into the present, as the poem describes.

Attention is an alchemy that turns dullness to beauty and anxiety to ease.

Observe yourself closely. When you feel the impulse to avoid the present — by latching on to distractions, looking forward, reliving the past, doing unnecessary things, or rushing — pause for a moment. Rather than immediately acting on the impulse, allow it to flow by. Remain in the present, in a state of awareness.

Again, our predilection for rushing is partly cultural, due to the pressure to be active and productive.

Rushing. This is a variant of looking forward to the future, applied to activity. Of course, rushing is sometimes necessary in our hectic modern lives. But you may find yourself rushing even when you don’t need to, when you have ample time to spare and no appointments or deadlines to meet.

We’re encouraged to be unnecessarily active by our modern materialistic culture, which teaches us that our lives have value only when they are busy and productive.

Unnecessary activity. Do you find yourself doing things simply to fill empty spaces of time? Do you engage in household chores that don’t really need to be done or work extra hours in your job because you don’t know what to do with your leisure time? If so, you’re using doing as an escape from being. You’re trying to flee the present by immersing y

Negative contemplation of the past is the origin of thought patterns such as “If only I had … ,” “I should have … ,” and “I could have … ,” which are entirely futile and serve only to make us feel more dissatisfied.