"Pissing on the Present"

A few weeks ago, one of my yoga instructors was describing the challenges many of us face in tuning out mental chatter and focusing on being in the moment. She remarked, "if you have one foot in the past and one in the future, you are pissing on the present." These words resonated with me, as someone who is prone to dwelling on the past (after all I am a historian) and sometimes not in especially constructive ways and as someone who is also prone to worrying about the future. What if? What if? What if? These past few weeks of the summer have presented me with the chance to spend more time in the present moment in my yoga studio. There are definitely still moments when I'm thinking about the past (and not just the seventeenth century) or fretting about the future (Alaska's economic outlook especially) or tuning out (wasting time on social media), but I've tried to take those words to heart and spend more time centered and aware of the now.

Through more time on my yoga mat and on the trails I've been able to physically engage my body so as to help bring my mind into flow. In some ways it's a lot easier to do this in warrior poses and in the fifth mile of an eight mile run than it is to do this when seated at my desk (or, to be more honest, on my couch) and trying to write. Sometimes I can even be absurdly prone to multitasking and tooling around on email and Facebook while watching a show I enjoy. Enough of that! Life's too short to spend so much of it pissing on the present.

I don't need to post the flowers to Facebook to appreciate them.

Now that my summer class is winding down, I'm hoping to spend a bit more time offline in an effort to cultivate presence rather than pissing. I love Facebook and Twitter and blogs, and they absolutely do have some positive attributes (even for the act of writing), but they can also send me into a type of writing and thinking malaise in which I get stuck in a labyrinth of newsfeeds, and by the time I escape I have no mental energy or time left to be creative. So I've decided to put some new limits in place -- at least temporarily. Between the time I finish my online class this Friday (if not actually the grading for it) and the time I leave for Madrid in the middle of July, I intend to limit my connectivity to email, Facebook, and other forms of social media to just two or three 45-60 minute intervals a day. I still plan to interact with friends on social media and to read and comment on blogs, I just want to do it more mindfully.

I hope that by limiting my use of social media (and to a lesser extent to my laptop and phone more generally) to certain times of day that I'll not only have time for more yoga and running but also more time for researching and writing and novel reading during this period in which I'm off contract and have fewer demands on my time and obligations to students and colleagues. I really want to cultivate my identity as a writer and not just an academic one over the coming few months and especially in the next few weeks. I feel vulnerable and self-conscious but also excited about committing to spend more time engaged in non-academic writing. I'm giving myself a deadline of July 14 to complete a rough and gnarly first draft of a short story. It's time to stop pissing on the present because I'm worried about how long it's been since I've written in certain different modes or how rusty I am or how freaked out I am about the idea of future failure or about how poorly I might compare to others.

It's time to get comfortable with this feeling of discomfort. If I fail, I fail. At least I'll have been present.