It's My Birthday and I'll Be Mindful if I Want To

For the longest time — perhaps always — I thought “being in the moment” needed to look a specific way.

It involved stillness. Lotus pose. A mat or cushion. A bell, possibly a gong.

To access this fabled present, there could be nothing happening immediately afterward that may require anticipating. Nothing heavy, stressful, or unsettled weighing on my mind and heart. There could be no noise, or disturbances, or distractions. Which is all to say, reaching this state was as good as impossible.

And in the unlikely event where circumstances should align for long enough to find it, it would be very hard to maintain.

Despite all this, it seemed that presence — AKA mindfulness, awareness, living in the now — might hold the key to, well, everything.

Like happiness, it presents itself in fleeting glimpses. Between thoughts. Between clouds. In the swell of a cheer at a stadium or the opening chord of a song or a moment of perfect silence in the darkest hour of the night. Here I am, it seems to say, with a wink and a wave, as the illusion of ego falls away.

It tastes like joy and gold and neutrality and light and union and forgiveness. Like nothing is lacking. Like something worth finding.

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Today is my birthday, an occasion I have grown to dislike. This has nothing to do with aging or numbers (I am grateful to be here, in any moment) and everything to do with Time. I feel the absence of those who are no longer with us — friends I cannot hear from, my mom who does not call me at the exact time of my birth as she did for all the years before her passing. I sense the forward march and my inability to halt it.

As I take in that little calendar box, I cannot help but compare the shape of life today with the previous year, and the ones before that. Cannot help but contemplate this construct — Time, that illusory fox! — which governs so much of how we move through our lives.

In recent years, my birthday feels kind of like being trapped in the real-life version of that ticking clock Sixty Minutes interstitial. It grows louder and louder, like it’s about to tell you to take something out of the oven, but the something is your personal development, and as you peek through the little glass oven window, you can’t help but notice that it looks nothing like the recipe advertised. It’s raw in the center and burned on the edges, and now the clock is ringing and ringing and there’s no way to turn it off until the date finally flips to another, less menacing, number.

So yeah, I woke up feeling a bit restless. (Even amid this experiment that purports to provide a break from such things.)

I felt taunted by a story where everyone else is making moves, making progress, leveling up, while I languish in a quagmire of stagnation. (As though life is meant to be an ever-upward trajectory, where the winner dies on a mountaintop having amassed the most stuff.) This story is rooted in the past and the future, whose imagined benchmarks cast their shadows over my current reality. And while I can recognize that parts are subjective, and exaggerated, and in some cases just plain false, it didn’t lessen their grip over my mood.

It seemed there was only one way out: Truth rests in the present.

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