by <Name Withheld>

I am a third year college student and my major is Comparative Literature. I’m from Bethlehem, Georgia. The people in my life are the best part of it. 

I believe in being present. I believe that being present is complicated, and I realize this more than ever as I try to help my good friend find a job. I am sitting on the porch with him. He has been struggling over the past year to find a job, to properly eat, to live, to find a way to breathe. He is on his phone, as he mostly is when he isn’t engaging in people. He looks at the screen and pulls away from it to complain. Little else. 

Meanwhile, I remain completely distracted by my racing thoughts, and I can’t seem to focus on any branch on the tree in front of me. I can’t find it in me to relax. I look over to my buddy Pete, a morbidly obese kid of 21 with a sharp widow’s peak and icy blue eyes. He is lying back and smoking a cigarette next to me. He isn’t on his phone any longer, so his face and eyes are still and straight ahead. I ask him what he is thinking about, and he looks over at me. “Nothing,” he says.  He claims that he can keep his mind blank on pretty days like this. That he is looking at the tree in front of him and “that’s it.”

I ask him if he has ever tried meditating. He says he tried it when he was a kid, and he hated it. 

“Waste of time,” he crows. I tell him he should try again, and he goes on about how Instagram is good enough for him. 

We remain on the porch in silence for a little while, both looking at the same tree in front of the porch. Him: looking at the tree, counting its leaves, enjoying its shape. Me: trying as hard as I can to focus despite the rush of thoughts permeating my head. 

Pete spends almost all of his time inside on the computer. I do not spend my life that way at all. I struggle to remain present, but I wish for it desperately in the quietest and loudest of moments. He becomes present as he chooses, but rarely decides to unless he is connecting with others. 

Presence is hard to achieve for different people in different ways. Distinctions in desire and ability are two key ways of understanding one’s journey towards an ever-fleeting goal. Peter’s journey toward a present life could hold a change in will and desire for presence more so than a change in ability to obtain it, while mine could be the opposite. Both journeys contain stops and breaths, but neither will reach their ideal destinations because presence will never stay completely.

For a body to be totally absent, it must be dead. But just because a body is physically present does not mean it is living completely. Life is active. Living presently is not easy in the slightest, but I believe that to constantly redirect oneself to a state of presence is to reach for a colorful life fully lived. 

This is the kind of life I strive for every day, and the kind of life I wish for my buddy Pete.