"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity — a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year's resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible?
This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness — the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience — largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973), who also gave us thisfantastic meditation on the life of purpose.
In the altogether excellent 1951 volume The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, Watts argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction.
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