I was waiting for a friend at a café the other afternoon — one of those places in Ho Chi Minh city where the stools spill out onto the pavement and the motorbikes go past close enough to feel. He was running late, so I ordered a cà phê sữa đá and took out my phone, just to fill the gap. Instagram. A few minutes, I told myself.
When I looked up, the coffee had melted down to a glass of watery brown, the ice long gone. Thirty minutes had passed. I couldn’t have told you a single thing I’d actually seen on that screen — not one post. The half-hour was just gone, dissolved like the ice, and I hadn’t noticed it leave. He still wasn’t there. I’d been waiting the whole time and somehow hadn’t been present for any of it, not even the waiting.
That version of being checked out is the one everyone recognizes — the phone at the table, the scroll while someone talks across from you, life sliding past in a feed. It’s the easy one to feel guilty about, and I do. But the longer I sit with it, the more I think the phone is only the most visible shape of a much larger problem. The version that catches me most often doesn’t need a screen at all. I can do it at a table with nothing in my hands, running ahead into the rest of the day, week or year — drafting an email I won’t send for hours, rehearsing a conversation I’m not having until next week, mapping out a 5 year plan before this afternoon is even finished. Twenty minutes gone, somewhere up the road that hasn’t arrived yet. I look up and the room has carried on without me. That one doesn’t even have the phone to blame. I am just somewhere else — somewhere that wasn’t even real yet.
Harvard psychologist Matthew Killingsworth ran a study back in 2010 using an iPhone app that pinged people at random moments to ask what they were doing and whether their mind was on it. He sampled around 2,250 adults and found that, on average, people’s minds were elsewhere about 47 percent of their waking hours. Roughly half the time we are awake, we are not paying attention to what we are actually doing. As he put it, our mental lives “are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the nonpresent.”
His other finding was the one I keep coming back to: people were less happy when their minds were wandering. The activity itself mattered less than whether they were in it.
I am not a psychologist and I am not selling a fix. I have tried the standard moves — the deliberate attempts to just be where I am. The morning coffee that is supposed to be only coffee. The walk where I keep dragging my attention back to the street in front of me instead of Thursday’s meeting. The occasional doing-nothing-at-all version — sitting somewhere quiet and letting the afternoon just be the afternoon. Some mornings the coffee is only coffee. Some mornings I am three days ahead before the cup is empty. Some walks I am actually on; some walks I am somewhere next week. The practices help when they catch, and they don’t catch reliably. There are days I notice I have drifted six times before lunch. There are days I notice once, at the very end, when the conversation I rehearsed all afternoon turns out to be one I am never going to have.
What I have half-arrived at — and I say half because I keep losing it — is that being present is probably not a state you achieve and then live in. It is a thing you notice you are not doing, and come back to, and lose again ten minutes later. The romantic version is the meditation retreat where the world finally clicks into focus. The actual version is realizing in a café that you have been somewhere else for two hours, and looking up, and ordering another coffee, and trying again. It is not the dramatic kind of awareness. It is small. It is the size of remembering, briefly, what room you are in.
The present is the only place anything is ever happening to you. It is also, on the evidence, the place we spend less time that we might think. Worth keeping a hand on, even if the grip slips.
