Enjoy the Music
The present moment is all we’ve got.
I’m at the music festival. It’s the first day, and the headliner now is Florence and the Machine. The lead singer, Florence, asks us to make a sacrifice: “Put away your phones. Look at people around you, your friends, partners, family. Be just there and enjoy the music.”
Watching the performance of that song when no one recorded it felt like travelling through time to the early 2000s. I felt like the ability to enjoy the moment is one of the most important skills to practise.
The present moment is the only thing that exists. Everything else is uncertain.
The past is a blurry recording of events stored in our imperfect memory.
The future is a blurry plan which can change in an instant.
We can prepare for that, but we can’t fully control it.The present moment is all we’ve got. / Lenses Series
Why is it important?
The stream of content is accelerating, and AI is driving more context-switching than ever. Creating content is cheap, but consuming it is still fenced by our cognitive limits. Finding balance between acting, switching and being is an important skill to practise.
I enjoy music festivals as listening is a meditation for me. Even given all the negative health effects like a loud environment and disrupted sleep patterns, it’s a net positive experience for my state of mind. I consider these lightweight versions of 10-day silent retreats:
I’ve just started reading the book Four Thousand Weeks, which starts with a header: “In the Long Run, We’re All Dead.” The number of present moments is limited, as we have just around 28,000 days to make it count.
Do you control how present you are?
Enjoy the music,
— Michał
P.S. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, summertime is for spending more time outdoors and enjoying long days. Life and work get a bit more relaxed (often due to heatwaves in Europe). My summer writing is officially joining the relaxed club, at least for this article.
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I'm known from disappearing from social media/substack, regularly, for anything between two weeks to two months. Some could say, that's the reason why my growth isn't consistent or exponential.
But I have yet to figure out an alternative to those breaks.
I'm not putting my phone in the drawer or anything radical like that, simply, I stop caring about it so much and let my mind figure out what it wants in the time when I'm not feeding it with a stream of content. Then some time passes, my mind (eventually) is clear (and bored), I return, sum it up and live goes on. https://akoskm.substack.com/p/how-life-goes-on-around-us-unnoticed I swear I'm doing this every year. I should create a list of these articles. 😄 Thanks for the mention Michal!