Karl Clancy: 'All too often we are guilty of not paying attention and the moment slips by'

This week I could write about what happened in America and how it’s a society rapidly falling apart due largely to greed but I feel you’ve had enough horror pushed at you and so I’d like to switch gears and instead of focusing on the world and trying to understand it’s many vagaries, we might try to understand ourselves a little better instead.

So, who are you?

It’s a simple question isn’t it?

Can you tell me the answer though?

If I asked you to define yourself, to tell me who you are, you might begin telling me about yourself, your thoughts, opinions, sex, race, religion, politics, beliefs, hopes and fears, about all the things that define you, but yet none of those things “are” you.

If you took a page and called it “you”, and then wrote all those things along with all your quirks and habits they would, no doubt, fill the page, but you are the white space between the words, you are the paper on which the words are written.

None of what you wrote is you.

It’s my hope to help you pull back the cloak of your personality, the person you are “in” the world and who you are “to” the world (persona by the way, originally meant mask) and see who you are underneath the words.

The English language is perfect as a conveyance in this instance. “I am”, followed by whatever you want to convey, tells people what you are doing, but before you do anything you can simply stop the sentence with “I am”.

Nothing explains you quite like the simple fact that you are here. If you look at a tree we don’t ask what it’s doing here, it’s very apparent that it’s being a tree.

We can examine it further to discover that it provides us with oxygen, filters the air, prevents soil erosion through its roots, provides shelter for birds and small rodents, provides firewood when its cut down, but none of that changes that it was a tree just being a tree before we decided what it was doing.

So, what are you before you are doing anything?

You are simply here, taking it all in.

The whole experience of simply living, of breathing and knowing what that feels like, of hearing sounds without trying to label them, seeing sunlight without having to think about what it means, all of this allows you to experience yourself and by extension everything else, without doing a thing.

There is a problem with this though, in that we humans are blessed with an innate curiosity, so as soon as we know we’re here we feel impelled to ask “why”, and it’s this “why” that drives us, that creates in us a desire for direction and a want to find our purpose.

Purpose can be a dangerous thing. It can be transient or it can consume our entirety.

My purpose in this moment is... writing my thoughts, feeling the way my fingers strike the keys, bringing all my attention to finding the best word in the right moment to convey my thought, emotion and spirit, all enveloped in that single expression of who I am in that space and time, while being aware that the whole universe peers over my shoulder as it happens all around me, that there is no difference between me and what I write or the air I breathe or the chair I sit on or the table I sit at.

One word to convey a universe is all I have and that word is “now”.

The most simple way to be both mindful and to pursue excellence through patience, perseverance, intelligence, common sense and intuition is to increase our involvement with the moment we’re in.

All too often we are guilty of wasting moments, of not paying attention and the moment slips by.

Moments that we engage with however, last as long as we pay attention.

As children in school the teacher asks if we are present when taking roll calls but usually that just means that our physical bodies are in the room.

Then the teacher demands that we pay attention, so we sit upright and concentrate very hard and in minutes are usually distracted.

Paying attention to what we are doing, as though we were looking at ourselves doing it is a healthy start but in reality we have still to realise the truth, that the person doing isn’t separate from what it is they are doing, that doing and being are all part of the moment.

Life is an immersive experience and yet paradoxically we can live it subjectively and objectively as the participant and the observer.

All this means is that we are in control of making moments last, choosing the best way of engaging our awareness and getting the most out of life.

Don’t arrive at the finish line wondering how it all went by so quickly, instead savour your time like it was the most precious thing on planet earth, because it is.