The version of presence I keep encountering has a particular shape to it. Somebody is guiding, somebody is receiving. There is a container of time, an agreed function for each person, and a clear distinction about who is who in the transaction.

I am not going to pretend that is worthless. Some people genuinely cannot get out of their own way, and having someone hold the frame while they stop is a real service.

But something in it bothers me, and it took a while to work out what.

If I am guiding you into presence, the implication is that I know something you do not. That I have access to a state you need help reaching. And underneath that sits something stranger: I am giving you permission to stop. You have outsourced a small piece of your own agency to me so that you can be in your own moment.

So are we being present together, or have you paid me to give you the time to give yourself the time?

I think it is a modern solution to a modern problem. Somewhere along the way people stopped being able to just stop, and now we need an appointment for it. Children do not need this. As a neurodivergent person I have long stretches where I fall into the moment without trying, and just as many where the thoughts simply keep going. Both are true and neither required a facilitator.

I worked in banking and then in workers compensation. Call centre work, high volume, constant attention on the person in front of you.

The operating instruction was keep going. Be in the queue for the next inbound call. Work through the tasks generated for that day by priority. Tell this person the thing they need to know now. Find out this detail about their treatment and relay it in a way that produces an outcome for the employer. Do all of it as an agent of a scheme, so never forcing, always facilitating.

While you are in it you can get lost in the process, which sounds almost like presence and is not. You do not really notice how you feel until the day is done. Or you take a break and notice, and then spend the break dreading going back in the queue.

Looking at it now, there is a distinction I could not make at the time between wanting to help someone out of natural empathy, and performing empathy so that an outcome can be completed. I felt like I was there to help. I also felt like I was helping them in order to finish what I needed to finish. I still find that hard to separate.

Then came working from home during covid, and my work life and home life blended enough that the masking stopped having an edge. It was most of my waking hours.

I tried the standard advice. Step away from the phone. Take a few minutes. Do something else.

For me it did not work, and I think I understand why. Taking time away did not bring me into the moment. It moved the moment further out and stretched the dread across the gap. I was already exhausted from the masking, and the break just gave me more time in the same state. I was scarcely present at all, because I was already thinking about what happened after the break ended.

That is a decent signal that something has gone wrong. When the reprieve is spent anticipating the end of the reprieve, the problem is not that you need a better break.

And masking at work was one thing. Masking at home afterwards, to try and be a functional adult, was another. I went through a period of numbing it, which meant I was never really myself, just a masked person trying to forget he was masking in the first place. Never in the moment. Living in the problems of the past mixed with dread about the future.

Presence with two young children is a different animal, and I suspect the fact that they depend on you does something at a level below thinking.

You can get lost in play, and they like it when you do. You can get lost in simply watching them find their own way. It arrives without effort more often than anywhere else in my life.

I also know exactly what it feels like when it is absent, which is anxiety about what they are doing measured against what I have decided needs doing. That is just worrying about the future with children in the room.

There is a version of parenting advice that says be present with your children, and I mostly agree with it. But it misses something. You are also responsible for their wellbeing and development, which means part of your attention has to live in the future. Be present while playing, yes. Also remember you are the one holding the plan. Trying to be fully present at all times creates its own imbalance, and you cannot be one-sided about either. The middle path is the job.

On whether presence is available in the actual texture of it, the night waking and the repetition and the noise, I will be honest.

Night waking can be tedious, particularly when you are already deprived. But you do start to think about what it is for. They are looking for care, or they are frightened and need someone. This came up again recently. Everyone was finally asleep, I had found some rare time alone, and just as I settled to meditate my eldest came looking for me.

A year ago I would have been quietly furious about never getting any time. Something has shifted. He needed me, and I am the person who makes him feel safe. That is not a consolation I am telling myself. It genuinely reads differently now.

The noise is harder. It is my aversion and it takes me time to come around to it. My wife is much better at this than I am. But a tantrum, or loud play, is a person expressing themselves in the only way available to them, and the job is to meet them there rather than force an outcome. Forcing it usually makes it worse.

Stripped of language: being in the moment, and not focused on what is behind or ahead of it.

The Reiki precepts open with today only, and that phrase has done more work for me than anything else I have read on the subject. I say them twice a day and they have not worn out.

If I am present with you, I am with you. You might be talking about something ahead that excites or frightens you, or something behind that you miss or regret. I am in the moment of you saying it, and that is where there is anything to be grateful for.

I am not always like that. But when I am, that is the shape of it.

Being present in the middle of family chaos, children playing and arguing and making noise, produces a calm I find hard to describe and much harder to hold onto. It is worth it anyway.

I practise Hatsurei Ho most days, often twice. It is a traditional Japanese practice and it has become the thing I return to.

It is different from sitting still, and the difference matters. Sitting still is closing your eyes and observing. Hatsurei Ho gives you anchors and asks you to do something with your attention.

There is mokunen, a silent statement of intention to begin. Kenyoku ho, dry bathing, a set of movements across the body that bring you into the moment through the body rather than the mind. Joshin kokyu ho, attention and breath directed to the tanden. Gassho meiso, attention on the point where the two middle fingers meet in prayer position.

Different Reiki lineages describe it differently, so that is my version of it rather than the version.

What it does is provide a container. The raging thoughts settle, not because you tell them to but because you have somewhere else to put your attention. It is an active meditation. You are directing breath and

attention rather than watching what turns up, and it aims at a state called seishin toitsu, a unification of mind and spirit.

I am not offering it as instruction. It is what I do.

That is where I have landed. Not a skill exactly, and not just a practice. It is a state, and if you are deeply invested in the past and the future you need practice to get there, and more practice to get there under

different conditions.

The shortest useful version, something you could do in a corridor:

Clap once. A clap moves you from one state to another and marks that something has changed. Then breathe into your stomach and put your attention there. The tanden works well for me because it seems to

encourage the breath to go low.

Thoughts will arrive. Do not chase them off. Just go back to the stomach.

Repeat as needed. The air going in and out is the present set of events, and it is one of the few things largely in your control. Some days it takes a few rounds before that lands properly.

Regularly.

I am a parent with responsibilities and I am neurodivergent, so some things take longer to settle before I can look at them differently.

Parenting is the thing that provides the contrast most sharply. Present with the children in their fun, and simultaneously worrying about health and development and what needs to happen next. I am not sure a person can be truly present all of the time, because living in the future sometimes is how you take care of needs that are not pressing in this exact second.

I am worst at it when I am tired, when I am dysregulated, and when there is a lot on.

What I am better at is returning to the practice. That is the part I would actually claim, and it is why I feel able to write about this at all.

No.

Planning ahead, weighing consequences, thinking about what is coming, all of that exists so you keep surviving. There are plenty of moments when being fully in the present is not what the situation needs.

Just as with dwelling on the past or living in the future, it needs a balance. What presence offers, I think, is that it is the only place you can find gratitude. You can find fault or joy in what is behind or ahead. Only in this second can you appreciate what is actually here.

I run Hatsurei Ho live, most days.

The response is scattered. Some people are with it. Some are clearly confused by it. A few ask whether I am asleep. Some try repeatedly to get my attention by typing hello over and over. A lot of comments are superficial.

The thing that surprised me is how many people have subscribed off the back of those videos. What did not surprise me is the discomfort it seems to cause anyone arriving expecting entertainment. It is close to anti-entertainment. I am not speaking. I am breathing and attending to my fingers meeting in gassho, and that is the whole show.

What I think people actually take from it is a reason to sit down.

Someone gets twenty or thirty minutes where there is a person on their screen not asking them for anything, and they can breathe into their own space and let whatever is around them rest for a while.

You do not need to know what Hatsurei Ho is to use that time. You do not need to be doing what I am doing. You can just use my practice as a mirror and do nothing except breathe.

I am not asking anything of anyone in that time. I am also just trying to be present.

This is my own perspective and my own practice, offered in case it is useful. It is not instruction and it makes no claim to treat anything. If something is going on for you, please speak to your doctor