As the year comes to a close I have been considering what is most important to me for the year ahead. What I consider important for myself and many of the people that I work with is to practice more presence. We all live busy lives and when we are not rushing to fulfil all of our commitments we are trying to keep up with what is going on in our virtual network of friends. No matter where I go it is rare for me not to see the majority of people looking at their screens. When life, including our digital devices, has us so distracted from our present moment we miss a great deal.
We are surrounded by options and choices but who is doing the choosing. The vast majority of the choices we are making are unconscious either out of habit or because we are manipulated and triggered into our decisions. This is how we give up our freedom and control of our lives. Have you ever taken an inventory of how you spend your time on a particular day? How much of what you do has been consciously chosen by you? If we were to take an honest look at a typical day I suspect most people spend 99% of their day fulfilling obligations and engaging in habitual behaviour. Is it any wonder then that so many people only experience brief moments of happiness on weekends and vacations. For many happiness is more the exception than the rule. That is if you have ever even stopped to think about how happy you are with your life.
Nietzsche proposed that more important than answering the deep questions about the meaning of life, we need a philosophy around things like: what we eat, where we live and how we spend our time. To develop a personal philosophy requires awareness and awareness requires presence. My recommendation for the new year is to be more present in your life. Start by asking if the life you are living is making you happy? If not which areas are you dissatisfied with? Is your behaviour or are your choices creating moments of happiness for you? From there you can integrate a daily ritual to review the choices you have made that day and consider how you would like to choose differently in the future. The more you reflect on these things the more you will recognise you behaviour in any given moment. This way you can interrupt some of your unconscious habitual behaviours and start to notice opportunities that you have been overlooking. This is one process to increase awareness in the moment.
Creating presence in your life is a matter of becoming an observer in the present moment. Observe both internally and externally. Use your increased awareness to reflect, review and take back control of the choices available to you. More than the big decisions that we will likely remember for years to come, it is the little choices we make each day that have the biggest impact on our lives. Awareness allows change and awareness in the present moment will help you make new choices. This is my objective for the New Year and I am sure that each of us could benefit from a little more daily presence.
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