Here’s a fun exercise I play with every now and then. I set my watch for a 20-minute timer, and let that repeat, so it goes off every 20 minutes – to remind me to pause. To breathe in and breathe out.
Now you may find that to be really annoying, or it may be quite satisfying for you. The point of this is to build a structure to remind you to remember what needs to be remembered. Admittedly, the first day I started doing this, I found it annoying. I thought text messages were coming in or that people were calling.
But a fascinating thing happened on day two – I began to miss it, thinking I forgot to set my timer. It’s interesting how fast things begin to pile into each other. Also interesting is how fast and how slow a 20-minute timer can seem.
Now, in that structure to cause you to pause, no one else needs to know what you’re doing. It’s an act of “re-presencing.” “Am I here? And what time is it?” The second part is a trick question – the time is always now. You can only ever be here and you can only ever be in this moment… in the now. The question is: Are you actually there?
Even when I was in deep thought in writing or focused on a particular task, when the timer went off, it didn’t bring me out of that state. It simply allowed me to pause and re-focus, getting right back into the here and now. Wherever you are right now, there’s a space that surrounds you that makes your home livable and your office functional. If there’s no space, functionality decreases eventually.
There’s also the concept of attachment and detachment. Once you become attached to something, your choices begin to dwindle. Brain power also begins to dwindle. When we are unattached, we deal with reality as it is instead of what we pretend it to be.
Stay in the here and now, and consider the advice in the lyrics from Jimmy Buffett’s “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On”:
I bought a cheap watch from a crazy man
Floating down Canal
It doesn’t use numbers or moving hands
It always just says “now”
Now you may be thinking that I was had
But this watch is never wrong
And If I have trouble the warranty said
“Breathe in, breathe out, move on”
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