In which we try to be here, now.

This week a memory flooded back into my consciousness. It was the end of the summer in either 2005 or 2006, I cannot be sure, and I had just finished a summer working for the Appalachia Service Project (ASP). Most of the staff, about 125 of us, had spent the summer scattered throughout Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but had all come back together for a few days to close out in Jonesville, Virginia. 

It was a glorious reunion of a bunch of college-age kids, having shared a summer of hard work, now drunk on free time and getting to see each other again. Once I’d finished my work, I spent most of my time reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, playing ping pong, and trying to get laid.

In the following years I’d look back on this series of days as one of the happiest, most free moments of my life. I tried to analyze this time—why did I feel so happy and so free? The answer I had at the time was that I was free from obligation, that nothing was looming, and that gave me that euphoric feeling. So I spent the next years trying to discharge all obligations in order to once again feel that free. 

Spoiler alert, it didn’t work. That’s a trick about life. Even if you finish an outline for one class in law school, there’s still another. One day of work is usually followed by another. At some point I even started to feel like things I’d have on my calendar for fun were also, unintentionally, obligations to discharge. There was a never-ending list, it kept getting longer and longer, and I never could find that feeling again.

Now, nearly twenty years later, I’ve chased that elusive no-obligations feeling and I’m here to report—I was wrong. What I had in that moment wasn’t a clearing of obligations—there were still things to come—but an ability to be solely in the present moment. It is a simple lesson, one others have learned and that I’ve even read about. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve still had moments in the present and moments of euphoria—but I hadn’t connected these two things before this week: that my search for the freedom of no obligation was really a search for complete presence in the present.

Being present in this moment is really the only discharge of obligation, at least until death, that I can imagine. So here’s to a renewed focus on this moment. 

Watching: Welcome to Wrexham

Playing: Tears of the Kingdom

Reading: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano