Presence
Pondering presence.
Is there anything better than full presence? Regardless of the situation, being completely there can mean everything to the person you are with. And for believers, being as fully present to God as we can means so much.
I’m a doer by personality and training. I learned early that people will come and go and you don’t have a lot of control over that. But if you are useful to them, if you make yourself indispensable to them, perhaps you can win them over and get them to stay longer. Or so I thought, as a child, a teen, and a young person in my 20s and 30s. I also received a lot of early indoctrination in my family of origin around not being ‘lazy’. So it all formed me, and over the years I have become this very determined, focused, productive, and efficient person.
At the end of each year, I tend to look back not just over the past year, and of course 2025 has been a very eventful and fulfilling year for me indeed, but also the previous decades. The stories I tell myself about my childhood, teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, and most recently 50s have shifted significantly over my life. I do not usually find myself very preoccupied at the moment with the role of my parents in my life, or with what happened in my first relationships from my teens through early 40s. I have been thinking much more this decade and the last one about my current marriage.
From the time we met in September 2009, we had so very much to do. I had to sell my house and business and relocate my life to another province. Some would say to another country. Then set up a new business, buy a new house, find a church, find choirs to sing with, and create a life. All this while my husband worked long hours at a downtown hospital and my youngest was navigating high school in an unfamiliar environment. When my child moved back to Montreal, it was still busy in other ways. At one point my husband was working three jobs. And then Covid began.
Now it has been nearly 3 years since he retired and our lives have changed again. I have belatedly come to realize how unused I have become to being properly and fully present, that so many times when he arrives in the living room when I am in front of my laptop, deep in work, or in a book, or in a show, and is trying to tell me something, I am marginally attentive at best.
When people need you, they don’t generally come bearing a large yellow sign with an exlamation mark on it.
They arrive quietly, sometimes in great pain.
If I am not noticing because I am too busy, they can go out just as quietly without me really registering it.
So a lot of what I have been looking at over the past months has been how to shut the laptop or pause the music or show and properly attend. And it’s got me thinking during those busy years in my 20s through 50s how not only my friends but those most important people in my life, my three children, as well as other really important people like my nieces, got badly short-changed in terms of my time and attention.
In many ways, I have become my mother. I can hear her in my laugh, in my singing. I can hear her cadences in how I talk to people. And I can see that just as she was very very busy, so have I been. There have been differences of course. She did not re-marry. For her it was one and done. Though she had various relationships until I was in my early teens, for the most part they did not last long at all, and she remained independent.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Invictus, William Ernest Henley
Thinking it through, then, it wasn’t just the Protestant work ethic that has made presence such a challenge.
I cannot re-do those years with my children and other significant people in my life and be more present to them then.
I cannot re-do the first 16 years of my relationship with my husband and be more present to him in the past.
I cannot, for the first 60 years of my life, be more present to God.
I can begin today, and begin again whenever I veer, and keep beginning for the rest of my life, whatever time I may have, to be as present as I can.
Relying on the grace of God.
Listening, learning, and yearning…