Quotes About Presence

No matter where you go, there you are. —BUCKAROO BANZAI

Anyone with a smartphone and a full email in-box knows that it's easy to be busy while not being aware that we're actually living.

Like dropping through a hole in everything that the world said was important….Like discovering that nothing else mattered and all I needed was now….Temporarily removed from the game….Like floating weightless on the Dead Sea and looking up at an empty sky.

Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and author of Alone Together, has written about the cost of constantly documenting—i.e., photographing—our lives. These interruptions, she writes, "make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything." And by so-obsessively documenting our experiences, we never truly have them.

Perhaps smartphones at a party should be treated like coats, usually taken to a back room or otherwise stowed away until guests are ready to leave—a signal, like taking off your coat, that you're happy to be here and you're going to stay awhile.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. —WU MEN

In this moment, everything is sacred.

Don't multitask by combining your treats, unless you specifically design one as something stacked (a fancy coffee while reading a good book, for example). If you overload your treat time, you'll lose out on the full experience of enjoying each aspect, and the self-care might become perfunctory.

Unplugging helps you refocus on yourself instead of being pulled in a zillion different directions. Those directions may all be important, but you are just as important. Unplugging allows you to focus on being in the moment, here and now. It helps you step away from the emotional roller coaster that you ride reacting to a friend's story, a news article, or outrage over worldwide events. Unplugging gives you the chance to remember who you are at your core.

Young people know how important it is for dads to be involved in their lives. As I travel the country and talk with students, some of them tell me that their lives would be totally different if their father was around.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh explains this in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness:

Why? If we are thinking about the past or future, "we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.

Only to be mindful, therefore, is to be truly alive.

If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance.

I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

Love... Force it and it disappears. You cannot will love, nor even control it. You can only guide its expression. It comes or it goes according to those qualities in life that invite it or deny its presence.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Mindfulness is a quality that's always there. It's an illusion that there's a meditation and post-meditation period, which I always find amusing, because you're either mindful or you're not.

You gotta have some flash. Being a nice guy is cool and all, but to really make it in this game, you bring that extra quality.

There's something to be said with your quarterback your leader being there on Day 1.

A queen does not wear clothes off the runways.

You never remember what you say to the Queen, she just has this aura about her.

Actual queens are dignified, beloved, regal, and gracious, and don't walk into a room with their noses in the air.