Presence
These days have me thinking a lot about the idea of presence. Being present here, now. We spend so much of our time not here—ruminating on the “should haves” of the past, and worrying about the “what ifs” of the future. We are quite adept at time traveling in this way. And it’s easy to do, right? Because the present is ephemeral, one fleeting moment to the next. It takes a lot work to stay present, and not allow ourselves to be carried by tides back to the past, or crashed upon the speculative beach of the future. With this metaphor, I suppose it is very much like what you are meant to do if you feel you are being swept to sea: swim parallel to the shore. It requires constant movement and effort to merely stay in one place. The present is the only real thing we have; all the rest is a memory.
On my mantle, I have a photo of my Grandma Rose—my great-grandmother who escaped the terrors of pogromist violence and intentional starvation of Jews in early 20th century Russia. In search of work, her family moved to Odessa in 1905, the year of the worst pogrom in that city. She witnessed killings, was displaced many times, and lost several siblings and her mother to starvation or disease. She wanted to be a doctor; she was removed from her medical program for being Jewish. Under pressure from her family, she married a man who was interested in her, and importantly, was going to America—an escape, a ticket out. He turned out to be a bum and she raised my grandfather by herself in the Depression-era Bronx, supporting them by working as a seamstress.
The photo was taken on what I believe was her 90th birthday, and I am always awed by the expression in her eyes. She is present. Despite all of the tragedy and grief and disappointments she had known, she is not stuck in them. She is here. She is in genuine enjoyment of the moment.
Trauma is another time-traveler: jumping bodies, seeping down through centuries, across lifetimes. It can yank us back in time in the blink of an eye, either to an experience in our own past, or one we can only guess at, inherited as a hitchhiker on our DNA. The current understanding of what puts someone at risk for developing trauma is how they were responded to after experiencing a traumatic event/situation. Trauma happens when someone is silenced, ignored, discredited—when their experience is denied. Gabor Maté defines trauma as such: “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.” Trauma, understandably, can keep us out of the present. With the sharp memories prickling at our back, we are always looking with hawk eyes to the future for danger signs, for paths that will help us avoid them so we never have to experience again the agony of being unacknowledged in our pain. We are stretched thin between the past and future, unable to reckon with the present—to allow ourselves true acknowledgement of how we feel right now.
I came across a quote from Auguste Rodin: “Patience is also a form of action.” I think immediately of the Palestinian value of sumud: steadfastness, resistance, perseverance. Remaining, staying rooted when forces who wish your destruction swirl around you is a powerful form of resistance. It is a form of patience, a form of presence, and a practice of staying near the heart of truth. Most vitally, it is done in community—not as an individual act. Having people around you who can say “Yes, I see it too. What is done to you is done to me. Your story matters. I will stay here with you. We will not deny the truth.”—this is what keeps us sane, emotionally alive, present. Individualism, denial, and isolation keep us sick, scared, defensive. These are natural responses to trauma—the body and mind are trying to protect themselves, keep themselves safe. Tragically, they keep us from truly healing. They are bandaids on a deep wound, when what we need is to pull the layers away and face the root of the pain.
I search my great-grandmother’s face for signs of the horrors she lived: a wall at the back of her eyes, a plastered tenseness in her smile, but I do not find them. She is simply happy to be celebrating a birthday surrounded by her family. The traumas she survived undoubtably live in my body: frugality around food, anxiety around money, panic around lacking transportation—reactions that seem out of proportion to my actual experiences with these things. But somehow, she found a way to be present in spite of, or perhaps even because of the hardships she endured. This is the gift that must have kept her going: her perseverance, her patience, and willingness to exist in the moment that we are given.