Presence

Things have changed pretty drastically over the past few years; within our own lives and in the outside world. The Earth rumbles and shudders just as you would with your skin teeming with so many parasites sucking from your being. Upheaval is everywhere.
I'm sure you have your own story to tell, of how you or those you know have been affected by the inevitable global recession, crime, war or disaster. Mine goes like this: Almost a year ago, I walked away from a very comfortable life. An easy job, a beautiful relationship, a house in the country, a nifty car and an enviable schedule. I had reached the event horizon of an unsustainable situation. Within a few days I was sleeping on a friend's couch, single, bewlidered and on the other side of the world.
But in a matter of months, everything has changed again. I have been a researcher, set builder, production assistant, student, editor and a pizza delivery guy. Now I am back in Japan, busier, riding my bicycle between challenging appointments in the city. I am learning to accept that my partner of five years now lives with another man in another country. We will likely never see each other again. On Monday I was in London. Tuesday, Kuala Lumpur. Wednesday, Osaka. Yesterday morning I gave a speech to a hundred children. In Japanese. That evening I was in a classroom with people from Indonesia, America, the UK, Australia and China. I had supper at a Nepalese restaurant with people from Canada, Ireland and Jamaica. To say that life is a blur would not do justice. It feels more like a fruit salad.
Surprisingly, I feel fine. I have stumbled across a mental faculty that helps me still my noisy brain, my monkey-mind filled with the chatter of conditioned responses and if-then scenarios. It is Presence, and we all have it, to some degree. Another name for it is Awareness, something which exists neither in the past nor the future, but in the all-encompassing now. I have heard it said that there is nothing to prove that we haven't arrived at the present moment preformed with ready-made memories, that the past never happened in the way we presume. I don't give this idea much credit, but I am in no position to discount it. Because all we can really know is right here right now, and our proof for this is in our direct conscious experience of it, whatever it may be: an arrangement of atoms, a computer generated matrix, an idea in the mind of God, all or none of the above. Descartes thought, therefore he thought. He made an assumption that existence could be derived from thinking. But thinking is an inevitable consequence of being alive and having a brain. I am, therefore I think. I Am/To Be requires nothing but awareness. Not even thought. Much less a cartesian distinction between mind and body, for these are functions of each other. Awareness is that which observes thought. And I have a suspicion that it pervades the universe. Rather than flail around labouring the point trying to tie this up, I will call upon the eloquence of R Buckminster Fuller: "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."