Coming back to now

I am tired in a particular way right now.

Not the tiredness of one hard week. The tiredness of a pattern. Work, eat, a little exercise, some scrolling through the world’s ongoing catastrophe, sleep. Then again. And again. And somewhere inside that loop, somewhere between the third cup of coffee and the unopened email, the actual day disappears. It just slips out quietly, like a guest who leaves without saying goodbye.

My work is academic – teaching, research, the kind of work I genuinely believe in. But this is not really about the job. It is the rhythm of modern life: keep moving, keep producing, keep up. And somewhere in all that movement, lose the thing you are actually moving through. The present moment.

The news makes it worse. It keeps the outside world loud and urgent until the inside world becomes almost impossible to hear. We keep looking out there for something that will break the spell. Why do we do that?

When life starts to feel like maintenance

I know it has happened when I loose a sense of “NOW”. Nothing dramatic happens. The day just becomes something I manage. I answer, organise, remember, prepare and keep things moving. Eventually life starts to feel more like maintenance than living. A body keeping itself running. A person going through the motions of a life rather than inhabiting one.

Coming back to the present

What brings me back is usually very simple. I stop long enough to notice what is actually around me, not at the news, not at the version of tomorrow I am already anxiously constructing. I play what I have started calling, the appreciation game, deliberately turning my attention towards what is already here. My cat touches my hand.

That is enough to begin. I look around the room. I think about this life, assembled through years of choices, chances and things I was not always sure I would get through. I look at the plain, unremarkable miracle of being alive on this particular planet, in this particular body, on this particular Monday. Not the grand version of my life. The actual one, right now, with the cold coffee and the unread emails and the cat who does not care about any of it.

The energy we bring to the day

There are two ways to move through a day. One feels like pushing a heavy door that is already open: all effort, no movement. The other feels like water finding its level: not effortless but natural. Aligned. The difference is in the energy you bring to them. Low door-pushing energy is what happens, reliably, to anyone who runs long enough without coming back to now. Modern life has made the running the default and the returning the exception, something we have to choose, on purpose, against the current. The world is not designed for pausing. It is designed for more.

Coaching is not about escaping real life

This is part of what I sit with clients in. Not how to fix it, most of it is not optional, the work is real. The emails still need answering. The responsibilities are still there. Becoming more aware does not remove any of that. The more useful question is how we stay connected to ourselves through it. Together, we look for the place they can come back to in the middle of it all, and notice what shifts when they do.

 I catch myself losing that connection too. What helps is usually small: looking up to see where I am, and remembering that this ordinary moment is already part of my life.

Yours is too, and you are inside it right now, if you can stop long enough to notice.

Much love,

Charis