#16 Being in the moment

There we go. Right. I'll put the phone down. Put your phone down. Not going to look at the clock. Phones down. Not look at the clock. Stare at that fire for a bit. Yeah. Get completely in the moment, Marcus. Talk about it. We are at this moment. Yeah, it's. It's a subject I'm trying to do, like, focus more on and trying to bring a bit more into my life. Um, I've. I've always been somebody very goal orientated and thinking. Right, next thing, next book, next. You know, what can I do next, next, you know, project. And I forget that here and now is is really special. Really important. Oh, thanks. And right here and. Yeah. I mean I've been doing so I've been doing a bit of work with a counsellor recently and, um, it's sort of, you know, the work we've sort of got to is like that. I'm sort of. I need to plateau for a little bit. I've been working, working, working for a lot of years. The last 20 years I've been working really hard. And actually I just need to stop and smell the roses a little bit. And. I enjoy some of my hard work. Instead of thinking about hard work, thinking about the next thing, just enjoying where you are and the level you got to. Yeah, definitely. So I'm trying a bit more of that. That's something you do. You stop and smell the roses. You try and see where you are and just think, yeah, well, it's one of those, isn't it? Because being in the moment, if invariably if you look at any sort of mindfulness or you know, that is at the core of it is learning to be in the moment. Um, and I certainly think I've got better at consciously doing it. Yeah. But I do have to work at it, and it's hard work. Yeah, I'm quite in the moment in terms of changing from moment to moment, but don't stay still somewhere for very long. So I'm trying to get better at that, particularly when it's like nice stuff. Family time, time with my son.  Is that hard? Because you mean you got a tendency to flip around between stuff? So 100% is very hard and it's hard work and have to put things in place and whenever. So like, for example, with my son and the phone, you know, it's so easy to check an email to try and get some work done, you know, that kind of stuff. Whereas if I'm out in nature, I find that kind of makes it easier to just switch off. Um, but the other thing, which kind of ties back to what we were talking about last week, is I look for activities where I can't not be in the moment. It's kind of like cheating. Yeah, yeah, it forces you into it. Exactly. So I went from rugby, which was always that, and that was part of my life from probably 13 to. 35. So when that, when that went, it left quite a big hole. And so I've discovered jujitsu. And in a way that was almost because with rugby, if I was playing and I was catching quite a lot. So I was like worried about the result and stuff sometimes. Whereas with jiu jujitsu, if you aren't in the moment, you're probably going to get strangled. So it's kind of like you've got to be completely responsible to be present. It's amazing for that. So I think you can either like, go down the sort of Buddhist route of you've got to practice it and, you know, listen to the sounds and feel the sensations and grounding and all that stuff, which is really valuable. But equally, if you're struggling with that, you can just fast track it. Just find something where you're getting strangled. Go get straight. Yeah, yeah. Maybe not for you, but you know something? Where for some people, it could be things like. Like I talked to my father in law about it. In the way he describes, like, shooting and shooting air rifles. And, you know, that's that for him. That kind of focused on the shot and the breath and all that kind of stuff. So there's loads of ways to do it. I think you're finding that with barbecue and like the fire thing, can you, can you sort of. Because I can. I'm lucky that I can sort of switch off and look at a fire. And I find a lot of people sit around the fire and you lose them into the fire