I’ve spent most of my life living everywhere except the present.
If I’m honest, being here has always felt unfamiliar — even unsafe. My mind learned early that it was better to stay busy traveling through time: backward into analysis, forward into fear. If I wasn’t replaying what already happened, I was scanning the horizon for what might go wrong next.
I told myself that was responsibility.
That it was preparation.
That it was being smart.
It wasn’t.
It didn’t protect me.
It didn’t prevent pain.
It didn’t make me safer.
All it did was keep me from actually living the life that was happening right in front of me.
Not being present has not served me well. It has cost me peace, softened moments, and entire stretches of time I can’t get back. It has kept me braced instead of open, vigilant instead of curious, exhausted instead of grounded.
Part of presence, for me, is letting go of control.
I’ve wanted to control everything — outcomes, conversations, relationships, timing — because control felt like safety. If I could anticipate every possible problem, maybe I could avoid the worst of it. But when I can’t control something — and so much of life can’t be controlled — my brain jumps straight to catastrophe. I rehearse disasters that haven’t happened and may never happen, as if fear itself is a form of armor.
It isn’t.
Being here means trusting that worry is not preparedness.
It means understanding that anxiety doesn’t equal foresight.
It means choosing intention over survival mode.
Presence asks something different of me. It asks me to notice instead of anticipate. To respond instead of brace. To breathe instead of grip tighter.
I want to wake up and feel the morning instead of immediately reviewing the past or forecasting the future. I want to notice the way light moves across a room, the sound of a laugh, the quiet moments that pass unnoticed when I’m stuck in my head.
I don’t want to live in hindsight or hypotheticals anymore.
I want to be here.
Right now.
In the tiny details that actually make up a life.
Presence is not something I’ve mastered. It feels like a muscle I never learned how to use and am now strengthening one small moment at a time. Some days I catch myself drifting back into old patterns — analyzing, worrying, controlling — and other days I manage to stay.
But I know this much: the present moment is the only place I can actually live. It’s the only place joy exists. It’s the only place connection happens. And it’s the only place I get to choose how I show up.
For the rest of my life — however long it is, however it unfolds — I want to be present for it.
Not perfect.
Not fearless
Just here.
And for the first time, that feels like enough.
Peace,
#tutulady
#forwardisapace
Kristine Binder 