Dan Harris describes it precisely: many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. Tolerate this meeting to reach lunch. Tolerate Monday through Friday to reach the weekend. Tolerate the years of working life to reach retirement, when things will finally be okay.
Your whole life becomes something to endure on the way to something else.
I’ve thought a lot about why addiction made complete sense given this starting point. If the present moment is intolerable — if right now, exactly as it is, is not somewhere you can stand to be — then chemical relief is a completely rational solution. You change the state. You make now bearable by making now different. And it works, at first. Then it doesn’t work anymore, and you need more of it to produce the same effect, and then you need it just to feel normal, and eventually you’re using not to feel good but to stop feeling terrible.
But the root cause was there from the beginning: an inability to be friends with this moment. To find the present not as an obstacle but as the actual place where life is happening.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes: “The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s pointing at something specific: attentiveness itself, presence itself, is the condition that makes joy accessible. Not better circumstances. Better attention.
What I eventually found, sitting without a drink and without anywhere to go, was that the present moment was survivable. More than survivable. There were things in it — the quality of light, the specific texture of silence, the simple fact of breathing — that were genuinely okay. Not exciting. Not peak experience. Just okay, which after years of treating okay as something to escape turned out to be more than enough.
Years later, sitting on the cushion and actually laughing at my own thoughts — that circular, self-referential, endlessly chattering mind I’d been trying to outrun for decades — I realized: that was the goal all along. Not to stop the thoughts. To find the present moment interesting enough that I didn’t need to escape it.
Later never comes. It’s always now. Make friends with it.
