The big idea: why you shouldn’t always try to live in the moment

1 year ago 23

When, in 2010, artist Marina Abramović sat in a chair for 716 hours over a span of three months, she locked eyes with 1,545 visitors, one at a time, across a small table. During the first few weeks of The Artist Is Present, performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Abramović wore a blue dress to calm her mind, because her “brain was moving 360,000 miles per hour”. Meanwhile, many people who’d waited in winding lines to stare into her eyes, once seated before her, cried. One visitor described the experience as luminous and uplifting, and that “it always comes back to being present, breathing, maintaining eye contact”.

I’ve been thinking a lot about being present and wondering why I should strive to achieve it. I am a parent. I am a professor. I have a life, and a job, that typically require not just my physical presence but my full emotional attention. This is what I’ve come to understand, via osmosis, at least: to succeed I need to be present. Ostensibly this is for my own wellbeing; but the implication is that I am also responsible for the wellbeing of others. In failing to be present, I might risk harming them too.

The identification of the present, not as a hectic shimmer of zeptoseconds but a series of temporal clearings where one might deeply linger, originates in the Buddhist concept of “sati”, understood as “moment to moment awareness of present events”. In the late 19th century, a British magistrate in Sri Lanka collapsed the idea into a single English word: mindfulness. In its late 20th-century western iteration, mindfulness was more heavily associated with physiological than spiritual health. In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the earliest popularisers of mindfulness in the US, founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts, where he designed a secular, Zen Buddhist-inspired programme called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. He came to wider attention after publishing, in 1990, a book called Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, and appearing on a Bill Moyers TV special.

In the intervening decades, mindfulness – defined as the practice of being present – has become a popular life hack, a daily self-care ritual. Technology, you might cynically argue, has both intensified the need for mindfulness and then helpfully provided mindfulness “solutions”. The meditation app market was worth $97.6m in 2021 and is projected to expand to $307.1m by 2030. Stress reduction, better memory, better sleep, less pain, lower blood pressure, more compassion. The supposed health benefits are so numerous that “being present” seems like a miracle drug. Currently, there’s no fitness tracker that can measure compassion levels in the body; but many of the other measures can be recorded and graphed. Mindfulness starts to resemble a workout, in which a person’s performance can be scored and bettered.

Is this why Abramović criticised her own “performance?” The artist is known for her self-designed physical and mental endurance tests; during The House With the Ocean View, she lived for 12 days on an elevated platform without food or walls, her daily life on view. The Artist Is Present revisited similar themes of purification through relentless austerity. Abramović’s only props: a table, two chairs, a stranger, the present. She played on the power of celebrity and secular guru culture – with her plain face, straight hair, and long dresses, Abramović resembled a minimalist psychic or cleric – but at its core, her performance pushed the upper limits of how much “being present” a person could reasonably endure without cracking, and to make a spectacle of it.

Or a commodity. The mantra goes: “When you focus on yesterday, you cannot be present today. When you focus on tomorrow, you cannot be present today.” To spend time in the past or the future, plainly put, is to not be in the present. Stray to these other temporal zones and you risk rumination, with its potentially negative impacts on your mood, mind and body.

But what about nostalgia? What about fantasy? Are these so terrible? As it happens, I’d even like to make a pitch for rumination. Obsessive thinking doesn’t always lead nowhere; it can be like an inescapably intense form of dreaming. We might call this “drumination”. If the past and the future aren’t viewed as sites of harmful dread or regret, drumination might even be deemed healthy. Such a state could, with caution and critical thinking, guide ingenuity and creativity.

I guess I’m wary of the extent to which, now that it’s so widely sold and bought, the present, and the goal of living perpetually in it, might be misunderstood, or misused, or boiled down to nearly nonsense. To be forbidden, for the sake of your health, to exit the present might be a means of evading responsibility or consequence; to live in and for the present is to potentially exempt people from a continuum of cause and effect. To do this – to discourage people from linking the present to the past, and projecting into the future – is to create, paradoxically, an inescapable health risk.

Take this moment, right now. As I write, the air outside my New York apartment has been deemed “hazardous”. There are forest fires in Canada, and today the smoke arrived from the north. My husband said, “It’s like 9/11 out there,” and it was – the acrid smell, the yellow-grey haze that strikes the eye as incredibly wrong, or alarming. Our past was revisiting us and adding psychological heft to the moment. It felt, in a wrenching way, right to be recalling that time, recalling that fear, and using it as a way to think about the future and how different it might be from our formerly wildest imaginings. Our present hummed, urgently and compellingly with what had gone before and what might be awaiting us. I don’t know that an ethical life can be lived these days without a druminating eye cast toward such things.

At least, we reasoned, we might see an otherworldly sunset. We walked to the Hudson river and looked towards the apartment buildings of New Jersey, predicting something beautiful and uncanny might bloom inside the dinge, as the particles sieved most of the colour frequencies from the sky, releasing only orange. We waited. We watched a softball game. Abramović, over the course of her performance, presumably learned to tame her mind. Her most impressive feat may have been to be both present and not. To make people cry as her mind was elsewhere. We, meanwhile, kept our eyes trained to the horizon. All we saw in that present moment, and the next and the next and the next, was smoke.

Heidi Julavits teaches writing at Columbia University, and is the author of Directions to Myself (Bloomsbury).