Destination: Here.
Halting time-travel to be here.
I have always loved time-travel as a concept. I devour novels where time-travel is a key premise, and enjoy movies with the same theme. But, a couple of years ago, a mindfulness teacher introduced me to the concept of time-travel in your mind, which changed my worldview.
I’m constantly time-traveling into the future or the past. What do I mean by that? I mean that my thoughts are of things that happened in the past, or things that I am planning for the future. Rarely am I actually present in the moment, and that’s what I wanted to share today.
I am currently on a sabbatical. Part of the goal of this sabbatical is to spend some time being really present in the moment.
The reality of my work life is that nearly all of it is time-travel: imagine a different future, make a plan about how to get there, coordinate activities, make hypotheses, think about what that future might need, set up meetings… debrief over what happened, discuss past performance, identify root causes. We always seem to be working towards the next thing.
This is a familiar state for me, as I have spent most of my life time-traveling to the future. “When I grow up…”, “When is the next test?”, “When I graduate…”, “When I get a job…”, “When I get married…”, “When I move…”, “When I go on Sabbatical…”. Mostly, this is a good thing. I think that living in the future is critical for actually getting somewhere new in life.
However, I also think that it is to the detriment of the moment I am actually living in. For example, when I travel on vacation, I might be looking at a beautiful waterfall, but I’m thinking about where I’m headed next. This isn’t intentional, I know that the moment is what’s important, but I kind of can’t help myself. It is how I’ve trained my brain to work.
So, I turned to the mindfulness practice that helped me center myself on awareness of my body and grounding myself in the moment. Deep Breaths. Scanning my body. Being aware of the thoughts floating through my mind. Normal stuff. It helped. But, when I wasn’t being actively mindful, it didn’t seem to have an impact on my time-traveling.
Except when I was facilitating a group.
My facilitation and mindfulness teacher, Ron Kertzner, introduced me to the concept of the Field, which is elaborated on in Otto Scharmer’s weird book on Theory U and in the wonderful movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance.” Ron showed me that awareness of the field is a critical component of being an outstanding facilitator. I need to be COMPLETELY PRESENT in the moment. I can’t be time-traveling if I am in the field. I have to know what I am doing, where I am at in the process, what everyone else is doing, how their energy is, what is happening in the room, the temperature of the space, the sounds in the room, the time of day, the location in space and everything else. Being aware of the field is being aware of “the totality of information encompassed by your awareness at any particular time” (brilliant definition from Ralph Strauch in his 2008 blog about Perception). By being aware of the field, I can ‘feel’ when something is off and address it in the moment.
Becoming aware of the field, then, is an effective way to stay anchored to the moment that is happening.
It occurs to me that this is tapping into the same awareness that artists use when drawing. Artists see the world differently than you and I typically do. As an artist, you don’t draw the object, you draw the shapes that make up the object and the negative space around it. Our expectations and memories get in the way of really seeing. Just like our expectations (future) and memories (past) get in the way of us really being in the moment.
On this sabbatical, I have been trying to hone my abilities to stay conscious of the field as much as possible. I’m drawing more. I’m trying to stay aware of the field. I’m traveling again — but this time, my destination is HERE.
