What is the moment—the place, the person, the activity—that has moved you to forget the time, to lose yourself, and to return to what can feel like forgotten depths (or heights)? And how can you begin to get back there, as early as tomorrow?

Complete presence melts self-consciousness and self-doubt away. It lets us stand in our true essence without the need for approval or validation. When we are fully present, our awareness is glued to the moment. The complexity of our inner world is collapsed into one point of awareness. This lets us express ourselves fully.

Contracting our attention into the moment is hard, but it increases its potency, just as the brevity of words increases the potency of an idea, creating deeper grooves in the mind. If brevity is the soul of wit, then presence is the soul of experience. We cannot be fully ourselves until we are fully in the moment—attention nowhere but here.