A Companion’s Guide to Staying Present for the (Lunar) New Year

Snake and horse in one picture - why yes, of course that was intentional.

A month has passed since the turn of the year according to the Gregorian calendar. On top of this, it’s now roughly two weeks before the start of the Lunar New Year, so not very long until our alleged transition from the slithery snake, with its penchant for introspection and shedding skin, to the horse, galloping far and wide.

And as we enter new years in various systems of organizing time, we tend to both look back and ahead. We inventorize the year, count our ducks, and make resolutions for the next one, which we realistically and collectively forget altogether come spring. Just saying, it’s a bad time to join a gym – our institutes of self-enhancement know exactly what’s going on, and you’re definitely not about to get a good deal. A classic example of herd behavior and congestion externalities (yes, I’ve been getting into economics as of late, who would have ever thought). So if you’ve been dreading going to the gym, call your postponement of membership ‘rational inaction’ – you’re welcome. Just remember: optimal timing is off-peak. And timing is everything.

They say people tend to either live in the past or in the future, but that the hardest thing is to live in the now (cue good old Eckhart Tolle). So we’re either ruminating about the past or constantly thinking about what’s next. Extreme example: I once met a guy who had a huge tattoo memo on his chest that said, ‘life is about what’s next.’ But I’d say I rather qualify for the first category, personally gifted as I am with what anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner would categorize as a ‘melancholic temperament.’ Or, as I like to call it, a cow with seven stomachs (false, by the way – they have one stomach with four chambers): I chew and chew and stew ad infinitum. Exhausting. Keeps me busy.

And as we know, the turn of the year marks the perfect occasion for both forms of escapism from the current moment: a time of inventorizing and looking back, and another of musing about what the future holds.

But perhaps more importantly, it’s as good a time as ever to make one particular resolution: not to live quite so much in the past or the future. The biggest challenge is to be present. I’m confident I’m not the only one who ruminates incessantly. The human mind hardly ever keeps still, and while it’s a valuable faculty we ought to occasionally throw a bone – keep it occupied with something more or less productive – I do believe it should be interrupted on a regular basis. And, you know, I can help with that. Let me share with you some of my tried-and-tested ways of being present, right here, right now. Just don’t pin me down on the success rate…(but do pin me down)

Mind, Interrupted: Sex, Pain, Art, Connection and Exercise

How do we interrupt the mind with its constant replaying of the past, simulations of the future, and endless narrating of ourselves to ourselves? I bet the first thing that springs to mind is meditation, correct? The specter of which haunts me forever in this lifetime. Dios mío, I just get so bored. I tried, I failed. I tried again, I failed even more. One time I accidentally landed in a Buddhist center in Thailand, and while I did do some rather blasphemous things there, I just don’t think I have it in me to cultivate this practice. Or rather, meditation is advanced-level stuff – congratulations if you’re able to do it, good for you. Definitely not jealous. For the rest of us, the proletariat of concentration disorders, here are some tried-and-tested ways to be here, now, in your body, with yourself.

Good s*x. I have no ulterior motives for this one; I’d just like to objectively inform you that there’s truly nothing more freeing, grounding, and mind-emptying than being intimate without performing, and simply letting the body do what it wants and go where it wants to go. They don’t call it la petite mort for nothing: a temporary death of the mind, with not a thought in the sky. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite ways to clear my head.

Pain. Elaine Scarry’s theory of pain postulates that in pain, the world is unmade. Your attention is forcibly turned inward to the hurting body. Real pain undoes language and creation, and it isolates: it’s unshareable. When we suffer, there is no future and no past, only the present moment – and it’s unbearable. Unsurprisingly, my least favorite way of getting out of my head.

Arts & crafts. When we create, attention is no longer circling us; it’s recruited by the thing-in-progress. Think about being absorbed in art (making or enjoying), playing music, drawing, sculpting, weaving: time compresses or disappears. The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty teaches us that in skilled action, the body stops being an object you think about and becomes a means of access to the world. You’re no longer in your head because your body is doing the thinking. Whereas in pain, attention collapses onto the body as a problem, creation opens attention to the world as a possibility. Much better.

Real connection. You can think about the past alone. You can fantasize about the future alone. But you cannot genuinely encounter another person anywhere except now. Real connection only happens in the present tense. Genuine connection interrupts the loops of our mind because another person is unpredictable in a live way. You cannot fully compute them, you can’t skip ahead, and connecting requires real-time responsiveness. The present moment fully arrives when it is shared. Honestly, this is what makes being a companion so incredible. For while bound by linear time (a set amount of hours or days), companionship allows us to co-create presence. Perhaps it’s exactly because it is so bounded in space and time that an in-between space is created where we can truly meet. Brecht already knew: In der Begrenzung zeigt sich der Meister. And I think that is a beautiful thing.

Exercise. Ha ha – you thought you could get out of it, didn’t you? I willfully deceived you. You see, you can’t lift a weight in the past, and you can’t finish a sprint in the future. In exercise, the mind is silenced and presence arrives when the body takes over. Is the act of exercise itself also pleasurable, or is it more akin to pain? Consensus has yet to be established, but at the very least, being done with it brings a whole lot of joy.

So off you go. Enter the New Year as the horse once was the snake: having shed a skin, lighter, more awake, ready to get a move on.