377. Being Present

Everything is finally going right and you’re feeling much better than usual. Far from pain and suffering, you’re experiencing delight. A powerful feeling of pleasure, clarity, and peace has developed in you. You cannot ignore this feeling, which you realize must be joy.

But then you start to reflect on your experience. You compare your present experience to your past experiences and possible experiences yet to come. You want this moment of joy to last, but you know it’s only temporary. You know that your situation will soon change and you will return to the pattern of ordinary life. You know that when this happens, joy will also leave you.

Before you get to experience it fully, your joy is being crowded out by the suffering of dread. You’ve become attached to a new desire to preserve joy, and this has immediately produced anxiety over its imminent departure. If you continue to think about this, your joy will be completely diluted by suffering, and you will suffer further from despair over your loss.

You know this, so you try to suppress your thoughts as much as you can. You try to place yourself in the present moment, so that you can experience your joy fully. But attachment has already formed and taken root. Later on, when the experiences that brought you joy have finished, you find yourself feeling decidedly worse than usual.

You feel like you should never have allowed yourself to think about any of this. You feel like you should have enjoyed yourself while you could. But reflection on your experience was inevitable. As a human being, you are always automatically reflective. The desire that followed from your reflection was also automatic because you strongly valued the joy you were feeling.

Only if you had noticed your immediate attachment to the desire might you have been able to intervene. Then you could have released your attention, and allowed yourself to live fully in the moment of joy. But this is only possible when your attention is already free and open enough to recognize attachment and its consequences. It is only by developing the awareness of how your own suffering arises and departs that you gain the ability to be free from attachment and present in every moment.