Human beings are probably the most inappropriately named species on our planet. Most of us spend very little time being. It would be more accurate to call us human doings, human thinkings, or perhaps human wantings – with being somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Most of us find it very difficult to be – to be inactive, or to do nothing – and so spend most of our time doing, filling every moment with activities and distractions. When we have nothing to focus our attention on, we usually feel uneasy and immediately reach for some means of occupying our minds…

Presence, or being, is an essential quality of wakefulness. Awakened people are centered in the present. Since they don’t experience inner discord, they don’t feel the impulse to escape the present and so spend much less time in a state of absence. Rather than finding presence a burden, they relish it. To awakened people, simply to be – to take in the reality of their surroundings and their experiences in the Now – is one of life’s greatest delights.

This is why awakened people savor solitude and inactivity, which allow them to be present and to experience the simple joy of being.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.59-61

Continual attention to presence, whether through formal practice or through moment by moment mindfulness, not only frees us from inner distraction and disharmony, it allows us to become aware of our own attitudes and assumptions, our unthought reactions and ways of seeing. This isn’t always pleasant: we find we can’t avoid seeing how we all too easily fall into characteristic patterns of relating to the world around us, and to its creatures, human and otherwise.

To observe our own predeliction for commodifying our fellow creatures, for reacting to imaginary slights and misunderstood communications, for looking away from each other’s distress, is deeply damaging to our comfortable self-conceit.

But presence is essential freedom; freedom not only from abstraction and distraction, but freedom from self-deception, and from self-absorption altogether. Practiced thoroughly. persistently, it becomes a delight and a refuge – somehow a homecoming after a long and broken time away. All that we thought were falls away. All that is left is what is.