"I don't need anything. I just need you."

Presence as purpose

I found this quotation from Blaise Pascal jotted down by my aunt (in her perfect script) in a scrapbook this summer.

Faithful reader,

Please excuse my summer hiatus during a scattered and itinerant season. Since I last wrote, we have been through 17 states (several of them twice), one province, and a whirlwind cross-country adventure. This journey involved sweat-soaked camping, waking to wild bison snorts, a lot of swimming, lightning storms like we’ve never seen, “Beware of alligators” signage, sleeping in odd places, magic moonrises, and two absurdly tired parents.

It would be impossible to sum up the last 14-plus months of our lives during which we were away from “home,” but the thing that keeps coming back to me about this extraordinary time is the sense of presence being the main thing. Presence in the now. Presence for our children. Presence to each other. Presence as priority, over a thousand possible distractions.

When you are constantly traveling, it is nearly impossible to be anywhere but where you are—mentally, I mean. It’s what is so absolutely luxurious about being somewhere else, on the go. Or if you really practiced at presence, even when at rest. You are where you are. The present feels absolutely real, available.

Living in what felt like the middle of nowhere—except that it was the center of our personal universe—from mid-October to the end of June, gave us permission to simply be present to the luxury of that simple life. Our world rotated around the places we called home there…the house, the brook, the library, the tiny towns we occasionally ventured. Almost nothing beckoned away our presence from the here and now. We weren’t striving toward an imagined future, nor ruminating on things beyond our control. We simply were where we were. Give us this day our daily bread.

In hindsight, I see that particular part of our time away as my season of hermitage. A practice in presence to things moving within.

You might say the whole of our experience was about creating a season of presence for our nuclear family—with each other, for each other, about each other, with no swirling outside influences or dramas or diversions to contend with. A time of establishing and practicing the values, mindsets, and habits we most want to live by—without any external voices chiming in about what those should or shouldn’t be.

I have noticed that in order to exist in an intentional way—without getting swept up in the fray of whomever is around you—you must have a strong, rooted sense of presence within yourself, for yourself, about yourself. You must be able to say, I am who I am, and I know who that is. I believe in myself. I trust myself. I honor myself. I invite my real, authentic self to the surface, and I respect that self.

Sometimes in order to find this most honest seed of who you are, you must remove yourself from all the contexts that have otherwise defined you. I have had to do this many times, in many ways, at multiple cruxes in my life.

And to those who may try to change/influence/improve/fix/help/control/pressure/ bully/manipulate/advise/etc. whomever that real self is, we must practice a new phrase I’ve just learned and will wholeheartedly be adopting: compassionate detachment.

As I get older, I am painfully aware that my attention is frazzled. I’m less capable than I used to be of holding many things at once. When I give too much attention—too much energy—to things that don’t matter, I have less attention—less presence—for the things that really do.

Sometimes when Asher (3) is crying/frustrated/mad/upset, I’ll exasperatedly ask him what he needs. He frequently responds with, “I don’t need anything. I just need you.”

Every time I hear these words, I am chastened. So often I get carried away with attempts at quick fixes, little appeasements, when all my child really needs is me. Total presence. Genuine being-with, without trying to do anything besides just sitting with him, holding him, listening, accepting. Allowing him to be himself in his fullest expression, whether he’s crying or laughing or raging or screaming or wiggling. The fact that he can articulate this, even now, always surprises me anew.

This kind of being-with doesn’t happen by accident. It generally doesn’t happen just by being at home together in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It usually doesn’t happen when I am distracted by work, by text messages, by my endless to-do list, by the five things at the back of my mind I am trying to work out for myself.

Real presence is a choice. It takes a lot of time. It takes sacrifice. It takes humbling. It takes the laying down of many other “priorities” and any agenda I may have cooked up in my head.

Honest being-with someone, someThing—cannot, in fact, involve an agenda. If you have some fixed idea of what needs to be said, or prompted, or taught, or some bit of wisdom to be imparted, or an expectation of a particular outcome, or the endless need to have the last word, then what you have attempted is not presence at all, but rather some kind of performance. Some kind of masked, manipulative act.

As I have quoted before, and I will surely quote again, Simone Weil’s admonition that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” is the ultimate call towards pure presence.

She says, “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”—so when we offer our genuine presence to others, to ourselves, to the now, to the natural world, to pain, to joy, to suffering, to beauty, we enter into a kind of prayer. Presence—real prayer—leaves no space for apathy.

Presence is difficult. Presence requires (often) that we set society’s demands aside. We set other people’s expectations for how we ought to conduct our lives to the backest back burner and move toward something else instead. We set our phones aside and we really be where we are. We set our insecurities aside. We set the need to feel important aside.

When we choose presence as our greatest goal, over perfection, over our need for power, for being right, for prestige, for feeling understood, for a comfortable or easy life, for material luxury, for others’ approval, for the upper hand, for popularity, for being liked by everyone, for being considered rich, cool, attractive, impressive, virtuous, “good,” successful, savvy, relevant, clever, glamorous, ___________—we choose an infinitely harder (and likely misunderstood) way of walking through the world.

It’s almost a surefire way to be regarded as Weird. Unconventional. Confusing. Abnormal. Unwise. Offbeat. Naive.

Choosing faithful presence to God’s stirrings within us—over and against what anyone else may think is appropriate or necessary or responsible for our lives—is a risk.

Choosing faithful presence to the truths we know deep inside about ourselves, for ourselves, is to say: I celebrate what and whom a loving and creative Creator has made me to be.

When we choose presence for ourselves, for our children, for the things and people and moments in our lives that really matter, we live radically. We live counter-culturally. We live in the audacious middle, where a life of loving presence is never black or white but rather a cacophony of joyful color.

With this unexpected palette we color outside the lines. We draw our own lines, for the life we want to lead. For the life we are leading. We become free.

Ryan turned 40 a couple days after we landed back on California soil. I will soon, too. And what I can’t help thinking is that Carl Jung was absolutely onto something when he said, “Life really does begin at 40. Up until then you are just doing research.”

To take a pause (in whatever way that’s available to you; in whatever way you’re willing to invest in, and potentially make sacrifices for)—in order to practice more purposeful presence; in order to consider the research—is not about being lazy, or escapist, or unmotivated, or un-driven; it’s not taking an “early retirement,” or being negligent, lost, or floundering.

It is to willingly, intentionally, mindfully, step out of the mouse-wheel in order to take steps towards making the rest of one’s life a joyous experiment in loving living, rather than a slog.

To choose this way is to place value on an utterly different kind of personal rigor, apart from the bottomless accumulation of wealth or the endless climb towards higher social status. It is to not accept the status quo tirelessly spinning around you.

To step away from the churning routine for a time is to say: my safety and security—my sense of value and worth—lie in something much more deeply rooted than any definitions others try to assign me.

I am not the labels the world wants to place upon me. I find my purpose through practicing presence.

As for me, I’d do it all over again. In a heartbeat.