Are you here?
Why being present is the precondition for everything you build, including yourself.
I didn’t mean where you are. Nor is it about how fast you react, how well you multitask, or how efficiently you get things done. It is not about forcing yourself to stop thinking about the past or the future, either. It is about presence: open, full awareness of the moment you are actually in.
Most of the time, you are not in it.
We have all experienced this before: you have driven somewhere and arrived with no memory of the drive. The turns happened, the lights were obeyed, and you were not there for any of it. Your mind handled the whole thing while you were elsewhere, replaying something, planning something… gone! People treat that as a quirk of tired driving. It is not a quirk. It is the ordinary way most hours pass.
So, were you not in the moment during these times? Were you elsewhere and out of the now? The reality is, it is impossible to live anywhere else. You are alive in the moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not even a second from now. Then it is about awareness, which leaves one question: Are you aware of your own aliveness, or are you running on auto?
You came into the world able to be here, in the present. Every child is, before anyone teaches them otherwise. What you did not arrive with was the language for it, or the understanding of it, and language and understanding live in the mind. Your mind. An instrument that happens to be a bespoke supercomputer designed from the ground up for you, and by you. So you reached for the mind, because it was the only instrument anyone had shown you, and the people showing you had reached for it too and believed in it, the way they had been taught to.
Think of the mind as a very sharp knife. It is precise and powerful, and, like any instrument, it can operate in multiple states. One state is defensive: protection, survival, bracing for the surprise, the attack, the thing that might go wrong. The other is creative: guiding, making something, judging an idea, shaping a thing into the world. In essence, this instrument, your mind, is a Guiding and Guarding supercomputer running on external-sensory input filtered through your internal rules. Designed for the core purpose of guiding and guarding the driver — you, the soul — in this world. Remember, it’s bespoke to you. If I wanted to navigate and explore the dunes, I would have a very specific car (instrument) to use. Similarly, if I wanted to navigate the forests, I would need a specific instrument that would give me the greatest capability to explore and potential for growth. To put it simply, it’s a navigation system. And just like in any car, a navigation system does not really know the driver; it was never designed to. It is, however, designed to take in your unique inputs as intentions — your free will.
Your mind’s defensive state is needed when something is physically coming at you, when the threat is real, the fear is accurate, and your self-defense mode is turned on, so you can fight and protect, or move. It does take a lot of energy and is considered high-impact on internal systems. It’s your “RED ALERT! SHIELDS UP!” just like on Star Trek. You can neither explore nor truly create during this state. It’s about navigating out of the situation. The creative state, however, is the instrument for you to bring something into a world that did not yet have it. It’s bespoke to you and novel.
There has never been anything wrong with the mind. We just didn’t know how to use a supercomputer-guiding-and-guarding knife. The fact is that you were never handed a manual for you to read and study about your own mind, so you set its rules yourself, by what hurt and what did not, and every rule you set was set for a reason that made sense at the time, by someone protecting themselves with the only instrument they had. Nothing about that was a mistake. It was a person doing their best in the dark, and they did fine. And because people build from the state they are in, the systems around us carry the same configurations.
Here is the part that is worth being slow about, because it is a different question than which state the mind is in. In fact, it is not about the instrument at all. It is about who you think you are. Where language and understanding come into play. It’s not a one-way street; you and the others express and receive understanding through different mediums and sensors, back and forth, continuously. Over time, using your instrument, your understanding of anything is shaped by impressions, experiences, beliefs, and ideas you accepted as-is, transmuted, molded, or attempted to block. The data that you are absorbing (programming yourself with) is both diluted and highly distorted, by design. Hardly any truth from it, but instead a compounding set of guiding arrows and guarding signs about something that you may or may not have experienced yourself.
You can do two things with this data. You can participate in it: wear it, use it, move through it, let it go when the moment changes, the way you let go of a tool when the work is done, and never identify it as you. Or you can subscribe to it: give it your loyalty and your trust, defend it, make it the thing you would lose, and make it your identity. The first is an ephemeral mask you put on and let go of when needed. The second is an identity that has you. This is not a verdict nor a goal to have no identities; no one does, and chasing zero is just one more thing to subscribe to. But the direction worth walking is toward fewer, continued de-identification, because what you participate in costs nothing to put down, and what you subscribe to cannot be put down without feeling like you lost something. From then on, some part of you is always holding it, even here, even now, even in this. Whether you walk that direction is only yours to choose. No one can choose it for you, and in the end, it only answers to you.
That holding, in a defensive state, has a feeling. It’s a fear-based feeling, such as anxiety, stress, trauma, and doubt. It’s not a fear coming from the outside; rather, it’s within your own mind, steadily working, defending a version of yourself you cannot afford to lose. In some cases, it does not feel like fear, but feels more like responsibility. Coping. Keeping things together. It is the most reasonable-sounding voice you have, and it has been defending that version of you for so long that it has stopped feeling like something you are doing and started feeling like who you are. But it is not who you are. It is who you are protecting.
It runs hardest when the version you subscribed to was built from the outside, when who you are has been pinned to how someone sees you, how the people you need would judge you, if they could. They cannot see you — no one can — but you act as if they do. Every act becomes a reason to keep them, and keeping them means weighing yourself against them without pause. The only reason one would do so is that they see part of themselves as an error and look to replace it with validation and love from the outside. Here, the love of the self, for that part, has become conditional. And a condition can only be applied by changing the knobs in your own mind. Judging yourself will always enslave you to an external someone who is in charge of your beingness.
What you actually are was never one of those weighed versions. It was always under them, never made by them, and never judged by them, just covered by layer after layer of versions you subscribed to. The letting go is the work of a whole life, and it does not finish, because the confusion does not end, and you will keep adding layers for as long as you are alive. That is not a failure. That is the reality of it. It’s the path we take to see ourselves from different perspectives. And the load you carry must be lightened at every step to ensure what you keep is yours.
When the defensive mode is matched to a real physical threat, such as your hand on fire, retracting before you think, the driver staying out of the loop is needed; involvement would slow the reaction down, and the configuration handles it seamlessly. But when defensive mode runs on what isn’t a physical threat, such as a difficult conversation, an uncertain decision, or silence, the same automatic routing fires, the moment passes through the old configuration, and you were not there. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. It got done. You did not leave the moment. The moment was routed past you, before you arrived.
Now look at what we built around us.
Suddenly, a clinic runs ninety minutes late. The appointment was the plan. The person becomes the part that absorbs everything the plan can no longer hold. They message work, move the childcare, push the next thing, sit in the waiting room paying for a failed forecast with their afternoon and their attention. Nothing malfunctioned. The system did exactly what it was built to do. It was built to keep its plan and let the person carry the difference. And we deal with such circumstances as the way life is, a natural part of the human condition.
It is not a defect in the systems. It is the systems faithfully carrying the state of the people who made them, and you do not repair a faithful reflection by polishing the mirror. It is the accumulated beingness of people building while absent, each one shouldering the cost of the unplanned moment, and all of us agreeing not to notice. A plan is a guess about a place no one has been. The moment is the only place anyone has ever lived. Almost everything we have built defends the guess and bills the moment, and we call that normal because the people who built it were not present to call it anything else.
The future still needs planning. Calendars should be scheduled; supply chains should be planned; the people doing that work are necessary; and none of it is an error. The error is only this: a plan held as more real than the person in front of it, by a builder who was not in front of anything.
Life happens. And as such, the systems we build need to lean to us, align with us, and adapt to our continued becoming. There is nothing more sacred than this moment.
So, what is the ask? Well, to start, inner work, and then, consequently, by the nature of who you are, the systems. Your inner work is about taking back what you gave away. You let go of what was never you, knowing you will be doing that for the rest of your life. And then you still design, still plan, still build, still do the slow practical work with other people, because none of this gets made alone and none of it gets made by waiting. What changes is not whether you build. It is what comes out, because what comes out is the shape of whoever made it, and a person who is here cannot help but build something that lets the next person stay. Not automatically. Deliberately, with others, the same hard way, anything gets built. Only now it carries your intention forward instead of your absence.
Outside of direct physical harm, the event happened, and the pain was real, but what continues to hurt is rarely just the event. It is the rule your instrument was built around: the belief that the other person had to be different for you to be whole, that their love was the condition for your beingness, that reality had to change before you could rest. That is where the captivity lives. The pain was not fake. The authority moved outside of you and stayed there. The best protection is indifference; otherwise, you now have a version of yourself created to react to this so-called “hurt”, and that version will keep waiting for them, for it, for life, to become something else before you are allowed to be here.
Your inner work to be here in the moment is mostly about letting go. Letting go of who hurt you happens through acceptance and forgiving your past selves. The versions you subscribed to, the rules you set in the dark, the configurations you handed authority to and lived under: those were not mistakes; they were a person doing their best with the only instrument they had at that time, in confusion that was never going to be resolved. It is accepting reality as it is, without trying to control anything outside yourself. The only change one can make is the one they are in.
Until you forgive that past-self for those so-called mistakes, that past-self is still here, holding the instrument, and you are not. That is the mechanism. Unforgiven past-selves are subscribed versions you keep current by refusing to let them rest. Forgive those past selves, and they can finally be let go. Forgiving others, however, is not on your list, and not because you are above it; it is because they are not your victims and you are not theirs. They have their own past selves to forgive on their own instrument, and it would be one more subscription for you to take that work as your own. Stay at your own, the space you can only control.
Only through unconditional self-love can you truly be in the present moment.
So, are you here, right now, for this? That part is yours, and no one can build it for you. Everything else is being built by someone, and it is either pulling people out of the moment to defend a guess or holding the guess lightly enough that they can stay in the moment. If you are building anything, you are building one of those two. I would guide you toward the one that keeps us here, in the now.
And whatever I just said… take it as guidance, not truth. Make it yours, or throw it in the trash. Either way, keep your agency.
— Haitham