Enjoying the Present Moment

            Years ago I was addicted to watching the TV show Jeopardy everyday.  My TV was in my den and every afternoon at four o’clock I would go in there and half-sit, half-lie on the daybed and spend half an hour with Alex Trebek and his contestants, guessing at the answers to the questions (or actually guessing at the questions, the answers to which appeared on a board under the categories of the day and were selected by the contestants, as in, “I’ll take famous restaurants for $200”).   I always picked one contestant to root for.  For some reason my contestant hardly ever won, and I hardly ever got any of the questions right, but I felt delight every time I did get something right and I felt competitive satisfaction when my contestant won and minor grief every time they didn’t, especially if it was during a play-off when there was a lot at stake. 

            I did that almost every weekday afternoon for maybe a year.  Then I got together with Viktor, rented my house, and moved to Fairfield to live with him.  I lost my study, my daybed, my TV, and even the ability to watch TV since we didn’t have one in Fairfield that you could do more than watch a DVD on.  By the time I made it back to my house and to Iowa City, my life had changed and I no longer had time, or even a space in my house, for watching Jeopardy. (The former den was now Viktor’s and my bedroom, my former bedroom was now my study, and Viktor’s kids had the upstairs to hang out in on the weekends.  All of that has changed once again, but I still don’t have my old den back or a Jeopardy-getting TV. )  

Every now and then I still feel a strong pang of sadness when I think of how I used to watch Jeopardy every day and the spaciousness of my life back then. (At that time I had come into some money and didn’t have to do anything to make a living and could devote myself pretty much to writing.)  But the truth is, when I look back at those times when I had the house, the study, the schedule all set up so I could watch Jeopardy, I see that there were many times when I didn’t really enjoy that half hour of television.  Even then I kind of knew that there was a certain state of mind that would make it possible for me to enjoy that little window of time and another one that would keep me from enjoying it, and that I was in the latter a lot more than the former. 

Often, back then, as I was sitting there watching Jeopardy, part of me was focusing on whatever problem or fear or worry was on my mind at that particular moment.  And I was usually feeling vaguely guilty, thinking that I probably shouldn’t be doing what I was doing.  I was feeling tense, distracted, rushed, and worried about what I was going to do next.  I wasn’t close to enjoying myself to the maximum, for all those reasons.

            I like to think that now all that would be different.

            Since then, I’ve become a lot more able to stay in the present moment than I used to be, although I haven’t gotten there via the route I used to think would take me there. I used to think that if I just made up my mind to stop worrying and obsessing and thinking all the time, to look around and see, really see, what was there, I would become permanently more mindful.  But I kept forgetting to make up my mind to be more mindful, and in the end the wanting-to/trying-to approach to becoming present in the moment didn’t work for me at all.  What did work, practically without my even noticing it, was doing certain things day after day, things that automatically made me more mindful.  

One of those actions has been planning my days in a certain way – deciding at the beginning of the day what I’m going to do and when I’m going to do it -- and another has been checking in about my day’s plan with someone else.  Planning my day is sort of like visualizing my day -- because I’ve touched down in every part of it during the planning I’m more likely to be present in it as I actually go through it.  I consciously make space for anything I need or want to do and then I’m more conscious as I do what I’ve made space for.   And knowing I’m going to be telling my friend (my regular time partner) specifically what I did when I check back in tomorrow, makes me more mindful today too:  Everything becomes a story I tell myself in preparation for telling my friend.  I imagine how I’ll describe for my friend that half-hour of sitting there in my study watching Jeopardy (if only I were doing that these days!), which activates the observer part of me, which activates mindfulness.  Mindfulness, after all, is about observing ourselves as well as everything around us, observing ourselves as we notice and interact with everything else.

            And because I’ve harnessed my time and planned my day, I know that at this moment I’m doing exactly what I should be doing.  I don’t have to worry that I should be doing something else, don’t have to fret and rehearse and mentally engage with what I did before and what I’m doing next, don’t have to feel distracted and guilty, the way I used to when I was watching Jeopardy.  Now I can use the mental energy I used to spend on that sort of stuff, actually paying attention to and enjoying what I’m doing in the moment.  I can even plan to tell myself that I’ll be present while I’m doing whatever the these-days equivalent of watching Jeopardy is.  I can write that little goal of being present down on my plan, which will remind me of it, will make me mindful that I wanted to be mindful, and I can tell my time partner that that’s my goal and then tell her later how it went, which will also make me mindful of being mindful. 

            All of which can, will, and does make me able to be more present in the present moment.  Makes me enjoy what I’m doing more as I’m doing it.  Which makes life worth living.   More and more worth living with every passing day.  It’s as simple as that.