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It's 8:17 am and my morning is already breaking into fragments.
I need to be out by 9 for a quick run for the house, back for a meeting at 10, and only then can I begin the rest of my day. This is not ideal for me. I like my mornings to think, to create, to be alone with my thoughts, which I consider my most valuable resource outside of life itself. So when the morning starts breaking up like this, I feel the tension between what I want and what my current state allows. And the default reaction to that kind of constraint is frustration.
I started to feel it this morning too, until I asked myself: what is actually taking up my time?
It was my daughter, tearing round the office, throwing pillows on the floor, reaching for my coffee, wanting to be carried. It was the errand for the house, which we need to function as a family today.
None of that is bad. It's good, actually. It's good to have a daughter who wants to spend time with me. It's good to do things for my household. But because those good things sit in opposition to the ideal state I want, they start to feel negative.
The antidote is to step out of the future I'm imagining and ask what is actually happening in front of me. That reframes everything, without pretending the friction isn't real. I'd still prefer my morning unbroken; I'm a morning person. But I also know a day is coming when my daughter won't be in the office in the mornings. She'll be off living her own life, at school, gone. There will be a day when I don't need to do these house errands either. And I've lived long enough to know that when that day comes, I will miss what I have right now.
I know this because of what happens when the opposite occurs. When everyone's home, I feel a little constrained, because I like space. But when my wife and daughter travel to see family, the house goes quiet fast, and I get lonely. It stops feeling spacious and starts feeling empty until, eventually, a friend ends up crashing at mine because I'm no longer used to being the only one in it.
This isn't a new lesson for me. My wife and I have come back to it throughout our marriage: value the current moment, because a constant hunger for the next one will blind you to everything good happening in this one. And the irony is that the current moment, by almost any measure, is usually one of the best you'll have.
When we got married, our first stage was just the two of us. We closed the door on everyone else for a couple of months. We were in a distant relationship prior and wanted the bonding time. We got bored of that after six months, being people who both like our own space, so we started opening our lives up: ministry, friends, community. We lost the freedom of just being alone together.
That was fine, it was the next stage. Then we had our daughter, and looking back, the time we had as just the two of us was the freest we've ever been. Having her is a blessing, and it has also taken away our ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want.
At any given point in your life, you're probably as free, as healthy, as young, as sharp as you'll be relative to what's coming. If you don't spend time in that moment, when you move into a more constrained version of your life, you'll regret not having enjoyed it while you had it. My wife and I look back often and say we're glad, glad we spent that early time the way we did, with the intensity we did, glad we didn't rush past it chasing what came next.
I've spent the last two and a half years in a season of learning after learning, emotional, spiritual, mental. It's been uncomfortable, and some days I want out of it badly. But the knowledge that this moment is valuable, and will only stay valuable if I pay attention to it instead of obsessing over the next one, is what's carried me through thus far.
Most of us live fantasising about the next moment, because the next moment is a blank slate. You can project anything onto it, any outcome, any version of yourself. That's comforting. But the danger is that you lose the ability to build value in this one. When my daughter eventually leaves for school, the only things I'll have to cherish are the moments we had now. If I'm not paying attention now, there will be nothing there to look back on. Since having her, the random, unplanned time my wife and I spend together has become the thing I cherish most, and honestly, I wish I'd engaged more with her during that time.
Presence in and with the current moment is what creates value that compounds over time. Spend all of it distracted, spend all of it wanting to be somewhere else, and you arrive at the future with nothing in hindsight worth cherishing.
So how do you actually build the habit?
If you're a Christian, start with something basic: read a verse, then stop. Sit with it. Make space to think about what you just read instead of moving straight to the next thing. I once caught a friend, Ammishaddai, outside church staring up at the sky after reading, and asked what he was doing. He said he was meditating – he'd read a paragraph, looked up, and let himself actually process it. That's the whole practice.
I learned most of my own meditation habits from non-Christian sources, Buddhist monks, apps like Headspace, Calm, and now Waking Up, and a lot of Eastern philosophy, mostly because contemplative practice isn't something modern Christianity has developed as fully. I engage with those sources carefully, grounded enough in my own faith that it adds rather than pulls me away.
I'd recommend starting with the Bible app. I think there are some somatic exercises on there.
Another way in is simply noticing. Right now: I'm at my laptop, two screens in front of me, in my room, morning light, construction noise outside as I dictate out this essay. That kind of narration pulls you straight into the moment you're actually in.
For someone who overthinks the way I do, this practice does three things. It quiets the mind and brings peace. It sharpens focus and gets things done. And it builds better relationships, because I'm actually there with the people in front of me instead of half-present, half-elsewhere. That presence is what turns ordinary time into memory you can return to later.
Most of us never get there, because we're seduced by the promise of the next moment. I think that's one of the quiet tragedies of modern life.