April: Roll Call

The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle.

—Tara Brach

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be writing about trust or presence this month. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to write about presence. I’ll save trust for next month’s topic.

Presence is one of the most important qualities we can bring to our relationships. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, others can feel when we are really there with them, free of distraction and judgment. Many therapists, medical doctors, and neuroscientists have discussed the research that confirms this. 

When I began conceptualizing the structure of this post, I wondered if we needed to start with a definition of presence. What, exactly, is it, anyway? 

But then I came across this line from Thomas Moore’s book Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life: “Definition is an intellectual enterprise,” he says. “The soul prefers to imagine.” So, perhaps we don’t need a clear definition of what presence is. Instead, it might be enjoyable to describe or imagine some of the qualities of a present person. 

When I experience someone as really present, I would describe them as having a lot of soul. I would also use the words tuned in, focused, aware, and embodied to describe them. 

There is also a mysterious, ineffable quality to presence, something that we can feel or sense but which is hard to put into words in a precise way. To quote Moore, again, “When we say that someone or something has soul, we know what we mean, but it is difficult to specify exactly what that meaning is.” I would say the same for presence.

In his 2018 book Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dan Siegel describes presence as “showing up with awareness and being receptive to what is happening.” Presence, he says, is being “open to what is happening as it is happening.” And he cites a wide range of research that confirms presence is the best predictor of a number of indicators of well-being, including physiological measures, relational satisfaction, and happiness.

Siegel encourages us to have some kind of regular practice that nurtures our capacity to be present. He cites the practice of walking through nature “with an awake mind, paying close attention to one’s surroundings” as a way to cultivate presence. 

This calls to mind the work of the poet Mary Oliver, who captured her immersive experiences in the natural world so exquisitely, like she does in this poem, entitled “How Perfectly:”

How perfectly and neatly opens the pink rose

This bright morning, the sun warm on my shoulders,

Its heat on the opening petals.

Possibly it is the smallest, the least important event at this moment

In the whole world.

Yet I stand there, utterly happy.

I return again and again to Mary Oliver’s poetry precisely because she was able to be so present with the world around her and then document her experiences from that highly present viewpoint. In the above poem, she puts into words what neuroscience has shown, which is that presence is a gateway to increased levels of happiness.

I find poetry to be highly therapeutic for much of the soul work I do with clients in my practice. During a session, I will frequently share a poem in which the author shares a parallel experience to what my client is describing. Usually, this has something to do with grief and loss, or joy, or wonder, or loneliness, or some other unique element of the human experience. Sometimes, as was the case with the above poem, one of my lovely clients will share a poem with me. I am always grateful for that.

In addition to Dan Siegel, Mary Oliver, and Thomas Moore, some of my favorite writing on presence comes from Eckhart Tolle. Many of my favorite strategies for practicing presence appear in his book The Power of Now. He suggest that, on occasion throughout the day, we ask ourselves: Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I am doing? I love this question for gently nudging myself out of the irritability or dullness that can take over daily life.

More recently, I discovered Rupert Spira’s book Being Aware of Being Aware, an in-depth treatise on a way of meditating that “reverses” the direction of our awareness from an object, like our thoughts or breath, turning the arrow of our attention inward toward our own awareness. This meditative U-turn happens when we ask ourselves the question: “Am I aware?” 

The ever-present awareness inside, Spira says, “never appears or disappears. It remains present throughout all changing experience, just as a screen remains consistently present throughout all movies.” Spira says the meditation actually happens in the space between the asking and answering of the question, “Am I aware?”

This question helps us to reconnect with the presence that is always there. We need not search for it outside of ourselves. Furthermore, the meditation should be effortless and simple, since there is nothing to seek after or look for. We just forget that presence is always there, right inside of us, and we remember it by asking ourselves that important question, the essence of which, is, “Am I present? Am I here?”

As I began to practice this way of meditating in my daily life, by asking myself the question, “Am I aware?” it started to feel like a kind of cosmic, soul-level roll call.

“Am I here?” I ask myself.

“Yes, I am,” I answer.

It’s a simple question, with a simple answer. And the more I practiced it, the more it began to remind me of the early morning roll call of elementary school.

My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. By the time I graduated high school and moved away at the age of seventeen, I had already lived in fourteen different houses.

That meant I got really good at starting over. And over. And over, again. It also meant a lot of experiences of being “the new kid” at a new school, sometimes landing in a completely unknown environment mid-way through the year.

The first roll call experiences in those new classrooms were always anxiety inducing, but after the teachers learned how to pronounce my name, it was one of my favorite parts of the day. 

First of all, it was one of the only times it was relatively quiet in the classroom. As an introverted kid, I liked the quiet (I still do).

I also enjoyed the anticipation of my name being called, as the teacher made their way down the list, through the last names that started with F, then G, then H. As the moment approached in which my name would be called, I felt a sense of trust that my name would be called. I was part of the group, and if my name was called yesterday and the day before, then surely it would be called today. In my life outside of school, where things seemed to be shifting constantly, I could rely on the meditative morning ritual of roll call, which brought the comforting certainty that my name would be printed on that sheet of paper. 

I loved the call and response aspect of this ritual, especially the space between the question and the answer. When the moment came when the teacher would call out my name, I would savor the pause, the space between. My name, turned into a question, would hang suspended in the quiet morning air for the briefest of moments, like a trapeze artist between the bar she’s just let go of and the one she’s reaching for. 

And then I would look up, smiling, and say, simply:

“Here.”

Because the question only ever was “Are you here?” the answer could always be the same, too.

The question was not, “How are you doing?” or “Are you sleeping well?” or “Do you feel a sense of connection at home?” The answers to all of those questions would have been much more complex. 

No, this question was simple:

“Are you here?”

“Yes, I am.”

Reading Spira’s work helped me to understand why roll call had always felt like a kind of meditation. Because, well, it was. 

Like many of the best resources in my library, the book Being Aware of Being Aware was also recommended to me by one of my lovely clients. I have been tremendously grateful for the wisdom in Spira’s book, and especially the chance to reconnect with the roll call ritual as a simple and effortless way to cultivate presence.

In coming to a close with this blog post, I want to leave you with a story about Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now, which I mentioned above. 

This book was gifted to me when I was in my early twenties. I tried reading it after it was given to me, and I could barely understand a single word of it. I would pick it up and read a paragraph and realize I hadn’t understood the message. Frustrated, I would set the book down and then pick it up again to read another section, only to confirm I just wasn’t getting it.

I wasn’t able to take in and fully comprehend the concepts in the book, and I had the sense that I just wasn’t quite ready for it. So I put the book away.

Then one day, about a decade later, I came across the book again. When I picked it up, I had the sense that I was now ready for it. 

I couldn’t put it down and finished it in two days.

It was the exact same copy of the book that had been given to me a decade earlier, sitting patiently on my bookshelf until I was ready for it. 

The book hadn’t changed. I had.

Perhaps I wasn’t able to practice being present until I had done some deeper healing work. But I don’t necessarily think practicing presence needs to wait for some future moment in which we’re “healed” enough to be in the now. 

If you’re interested in practicing presence, wherever you are on your journey, I hope you’ll consider the mindful nature walk idea mentioned above. I also hope you’ll take a few moments each day to pause, drop into your breath and body, and ask yourself, “Am I aware?” And if you can let your practice of presence be as effortless as possible, even better.

These days, whenever I ask myself the question, “Am I aware?” I allow the words to hang suspended in the air for the briefest of moments. As I show up to that cosmic roll call, my soul awakens into the present moment and, smiling, answers:

Yes, I am.