On presence, belonging, and the practice of being here
We can live in bodies for decades and still be learning how to arrive in them, still discovering the art of landing fully in whatever moment we're pretending to inhabit, still practising the radical act of being precisely where we are. Sometimes the body itself makes arrival difficult: chronic pain that pulls attention elsewhere, neurodivergent minds that process presence differently, trauma that makes the present feel unsafe to inhabit.
Arrival is more complex than geography, more complex than intention. You can live in a place for decades and never quite settle into it, especially if that place was never designed to welcome you. You can be present in conversations whilst remaining fundamentally elsewhere, protecting yourself from spaces that don't feel safe for your full presence. You can go through the motions of a life whilst somehow hovering just outside it, watching yourself from a distance that sometimes feels like survival rather than absence.
How easily we scatter our attention across a dozen different places, and how easily we judge ourselves for this scattering. How naturally minds race toward futures that may never come whilst the present moment slips by unnoticed, uninhabited, unloved. How some minds work this way by design, and forcing presence can feel like forcing a different shape entirely.
Yet arrival is a learnable skill, though not everyone learns it the same way. It begins with the simplest recognition: here. Not was here. Not will be here. Here. Present tense. Present sense. The weight of body in chair, if sitting is comfortable today. The particular quality of light at this hour, if eyes can bear to notice. The specific temperature of air moving in and out of lungs, if breathing isn't labored with anxiety or illness.
Sometimes arrival happens in the smallest rebellions against our own distraction, and sometimes it happens in the smallest accommodations of our own limitations. Putting down the phone mid-scroll, or scrolling mindfully when stimulation is what the nervous system needs. Feeling the actual texture of soap between hands instead of planning tomorrow's meetings, or letting the planning happen while hands remember their own wisdom. Letting silence exist in conversation instead of filling it with nervous chatter, or speaking when silence feels like abandonment.
Learning to arrive means unlearning the habit of postponement, but also unlearning the habit of self-judgment when postponement happens. The assumption that life begins tomorrow, that satisfaction awaits the achievement of some distant goal, that presence is something we can afford only after we've sorted everything else out. But presence is the ground from which any meaningful action grows, and also something that requires basic safety, shelter, enough food, enough rest.
Sometimes arrival happens gradually, like learning to recognise the particular quality of light that means dawn is coming. Sometimes it happens suddenly, when walking into a room and feeling your own life surrounding you like water, intimate and inescapable. Sometimes it doesn't happen at all for months, and that too is part of being in difficult times.
The practice involves a kind of surrendering, but not the kind that abandons boundaries or accepts harm. Letting go of the story about where we should be, what we should be doing, how things should be different, while also holding space for grief about how things actually are. This doesn't mean passive acceptance of injustice or abandoning the desire for change. It means rooting efforts for transformation in what actually is rather than what we wish were true, including the reality that some of us arrive more easily than others.
There are days when we forget entirely, when we sleepwalk through hours of existence, when presence feels as foreign as a language we once knew but no longer speak. When trauma responses keep us elsewhere, when depression makes here feel like nowhere, when anxiety scatters attention like leaves in wind. And there are moments when we suddenly find ourselves fully here. Standing in a queue and feeling grateful for the particular ache in our feet. Washing dishes and noticing how water changes the light on our hands. Crying and knowing that tears too are a form of presence.
Arrival looks different for everyone. For some, it's stillness and meditation. For others, it's movement and music. For some, it's solitude and silence. For others, it's community and conversation. Some arrive through their senses, others through their thoughts, others through their hearts breaking open. Some arrive through substances that open doors, others by closing doors that substances opened too wide.
The practice includes arriving in bodies that are aging, ill, disabled, different. Arriving in minds that are anxious, depressed, neurodivergent, traumatised. Arriving in lives that are precarious, marginalised, under threat. Arriving as deeper engagement with these realities, as recognition that presence includes whatever is actually here.
Arrival is not a destination but a practice, and not always a gentle one. Each moment offers a new invitation to land, to settle, to show up for the particular beauty and difficulty of being exactly here, exactly now. In a world designed to keep us elsewhere, this is both the gentlest and most radical thing we can do, when we can do it, for as long as we can manage.
The question shifts from whether we will ever perfect this art to whether we can keep beginning it, again and again, with the patience of someone learning to come home to themselves, and the wisdom to know that home isn't always a comfortable place to be.