One evening, at the sink, with your hands in warm water and the light moving on them, you are suddenly all the way in the room: the plate, the steam on the window, the radio two rooms off, the floor under your feet. It lasts about as long as the rinse. You did not arrange it, and you could not bring it back on command.
You can live in a body for decades and still be learning how to arrive in it. Be here now, the advice says, as though here were always a place worth being. For a lot of people it is the place they have the best reason to leave: pain keeps pulling the attention away, an old fear makes the present feel like the scene of the danger, and a town that was never built for you can be lived in for half a lifetime without being settled into.
So you learn to be present in a conversation and somewhere else underneath it, holding part of yourself back from a room that does not feel safe for the whole of you. Drifting off is a door that opened once for a reason and learned to open again. The practice starts earlier than arriving, with a plainer question: is here bearable yet, and if not, what would have to change before it could be. Often the answer has little to do with attention: a lock on the door, a diagnosis taken seriously, a landlord who stops calling, enough money to see out the month. Some of us can afford to arrive and some of us cannot.
When here can be borne, arriving is made of very small things, mostly noticed after the fact: the give of the chair, the sound the building makes at this hour, the air going out and coming back. Sometimes it comes as weeping, which turns out to be its own way of being entirely here. It does not hold steady, and there are months when nothing lands at all; to force it then is mostly to lay self-reproach on top of a weight already too heavy to carry.
Come home to yourself is a kind phrase that forgets a home is not always somewhere you can bear to live. The practice lives closer to the sink: learning to recognise the moments when here holds you, and letting yourself land, for as long as the rinse lasts.