What If Presence Has Nothing to Do With Being Calm?

There is a kind of busy that doesn’t necessarily feel like stress. You are getting things done, answering people, making decisions, moving from one thing to another, and from the outside everything looks fine. I know this state quite well.

For a long time, I think I confused being able to handle everything with being fully present. I could hold a room, make a difficult decision, help someone else through something, and later realise I had barely registered what was happening inside me.

I used to think presence was mostly about calm, stillness and meditation. I’m not so sure anymore. Increasingly, I think its value may be less about helping us feel better and more about helping us notice what we were about to miss.

Perhaps this has become easier to do because the spaces between things have almost disappeared. A cab ride becomes email time. Waiting for someone becomes scrolling time. A pause becomes an invitation to check something. There is almost always another message, opinion or update asking for our attention.

Technology has given us extraordinary access, speed and possibility, and I wouldn’t want to romanticise a slower past. But I do wonder whether one consequence of all this acceleration is that presence now has much more competition.

Last month I wrote about those moments when we know something and still override ourselves. Since then I’ve been wondering about what happens even before that. What if sometimes we are moving so quickly that we don’t even register what is happening within us before we move on?

A team can look aligned because nobody disagrees. A conversation can feel resolved because the difficult thing never got said. Sometimes we are already preparing our answer while the other person is still speaking. This isn’t an argument for slowing everything down. Life doesn’t work like that, and neither does leadership. The problem is moving before we have registered enough of what is actually happening.

Of course, noticing something doesn’t automatically make it true. What I hear inside myself could be useful information, but it could also be fear, habit, conditioning or simply a bad read. Our inner voice still has to meet reality.

Maybe that is part of what I mean when I talk about Inner Authority: being able to hear ourselves without assuming we are always right.

Practising presence

Something about this month’s Inner Authority Room stayed with me. It is a monthly gathering I host within the growing Unstoppable Community, where we take one idea and spend some time reflecting on it, talking about it and actually practising it.

A few people told me they had come back because they wanted to experience the space again. Some arrived tired; one person told us she had barely slept. By the end, several people were describing themselves as calmer, more settled and more present.

What interested me was not simply that they felt calmer. It was that they had come back to practise something they had already understood intellectually. They did not need another explanation of presence. They wanted to experience it again.

That made me reconsider the relationship between presence and calm. Calm may sometimes follow presence, but that does not mean calm is the point. Presence can also mean noticing discomfort, hesitation, something we would rather not deal with, or something we have been avoiding because getting on with the day is easier.

That feels more real to me.

So, as a community, we have started a 21-day experiment I’m calling The Return Practice. It is simply an invitation to notice when we have left the moment and find our way back.

I’m doing it too. Some days something useful comes up and, frankly, some days not much does. That is okay too. We are not trying to become permanently present, and I’m not even sure that is possible. We are simply seeing whether we can notice a little sooner when we have left ourselves behind.

The question I’m carrying with me this week is:

Maybe presence isn’t something we master. Maybe we just keep coming back.

Until next month,

Shailja Saraswati

Founder, Unstoppable Network

P.S. If this note resonated, you’re welcome to join the next Inner Authority Room — a monthly space to pause, reflect and practise together.

Register here →

Inner Work. Outer Impact.