One Moment, Please
I don’t know about you but my brain has a really hard time of shutting up. The amount of time I spend thinking about things far beyond what’s in front of me at that moment, whether it’s as mundane as how long it will take to walk to the bank or as existentially horrifying as questioning at what age I’m going to have children, I’ve long struggled with keeping my attention rooted in the present moment.
In the past few months, as my pace of life slowed down dramatically, I started to become more aware of the smallest of details. Things that normally would have passed me by in the daily blur of life continuing on, seemingly irrelevant. But at a time when there was less focus on what needed doing next or where I needed to go, the simple joys of the afternoon sun casting a golden glow over my living room or the squirrel perched outside my window hoarding his stash of nuts became somehow fascinating.
It was a small thing. I didn’t think much of it. It was just a moment out of my day when, if only for a few seconds, I forgot about the chaos and uncertainty swirling around me. Instead, focused on an element of life happening at that very moment in front of my eyes.
In psychology, it turns out it’s a bit more than a small thing. Like thousands of other people in lockdown, I took Yale’s online course on The Science of Well-Being. Of everything I learned, the most startling realisation came from the knowledge that the hours of my day I spent with my thoughts drifting every which way were affecting my well-being, whether daydreams of filming my pirate movie on a sandy beach in the Caribbean or worrying over deadlines. It didn’t actually matter what those thoughts were about, what mattered was that they were activating a different part of my brain, taking me out of the present moment.
This phenomenon is known as mind-wandering and happens across the default network of our brain. According to research, it takes only a fraction of a second for the default network to activate and remove us from the present. This is where we think about the past, the future, and about other people. It’s a cognitive achievement of the human species. But it’s also not doing us a whole lot of good.
Psychologist Dan Gilbert warns, “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” While the research shows that positive thoughts don’t have a negative impact, they keep us at neutral. No matter how good the daydream, it’s not actually making us any happier. Negative thoughts, meanwhile, have a detrimental affect on our happiness. Yet, humans are doing this during almost half of all activities.
I’ve always been the kind of person that thinks, a lot. I stop for a moment, and in my head, I’m trekking up the side of a mountain with my husband of three years or thinking about that time I fell over in the middle of the street three years ago. I’d never considered it to be a bad thing, to have my brain sparking off in a dozen different directions at any one moment. But there was a sudden power in learning to tell my brain to shut up. Just for a moment.
“Excuse me? You interrupted some very busy thinking here. Mostly about the ice-cream I’d like to eat later.” (Ah, those blissful days before the lactose intolerance kicked in).
As part of the course, I started tracking moments of savouring—the practice of savouring a moment or activity through remaining present, through sharing the experience with others, through physically and emotionally engaging with it, and so on. At the root of this practice is the idea of remaining mentally present and not allowing yourself to think about the future or about the end of the activity but really enjoying something as it happens.
This was late April. There was nothing particularly exciting going on. The weather was slowly starting to improve. My days were still very much based within the confines of my apartment. I wrote down things like reading a book in the morning with a cup of tea. I wrote down cooking. I wrote down the most everyday, mundane things, that were so much more pleasant when I took the time to do them, and only them. To read a book without lifting my head every three minutes to wonder if that person had replied to my email yet. To chop vegetables in the quiet hum of my kitchen with my attention focused solely on the task at my fingertips. (I’m sorry to say that, even then, I managed to cut myself while chopping onions. There seems no solution to that one).
Into this practice of being more present, I brought meditation. It’s something I’ve dipped in and out of over the years but usually always as a response to a crisis point in my life, as a way to mitigate major periods of anxiety in my life. Now, it’s just become a part of my daily routine, no matter how I’m feeling that day.
It’s ten, sometimes fifteen, minutes of my day in which I just sit. I just sit, in silence, and try to quieten flow of thoughts. I send the little guys running the thought trains in my head on their coffee break and tune into just being. Into just breathing. The world will still be there when I open my eyes. The news cycle will still be turning. The notifications will still be pinging. And you know what? They can wait ten minutes.
I had grown very accustomed to my fast-paced lifestyle, of intense stretches of working twelve to sixteen hour days at film festivals followed by some much-needed time off in which I’d usually take off travelling. There’s only so slow I can go before I start to get antsy to hit the ground running again, in some area of my life.
Admittedly, there have been a lot of moments on my travels that have provided a very good backdrop to stepping back and appreciating the present.
Like a lot of people, the sudden transition to staying at home was a shock to the system, not unlike the jerk of hitting the brakes on a car too hard, too fast. I’ve adjusted to it, mostly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t look forward to being able to accelerate again, when the time comes.
But I hope to carry some of what I’ve learned forward. To remember that there’s room in that acceleration for moments of stillness. There’s room in that sprint to stop and take in the view along the way. Even if all I get is one moment a day, I don’t want to lose this focus I’ve built up. I don’t want to lose an appreciation for the little things. Not every day can be exciting or monumental, not every day can even be a good one—but every day, things happen. Life happens. Even in the smallest of moments.
Slow down for a moment. Stop thinking about tomorrow, or next week, or even tonight. Whatever it is you’re doing, enjoy it for what it is. Just for one moment. Please.
References and Resources
Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010) A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind
Headspace (my meditation app of choice)
Calm (honestly, I used this once to listen to that Harry Styles sleep meditation thing but it looks like there’s some good things on there!)