You Must be Present to Win

Lack of presence is lack of everything else.

I mean this in the existential sense - as in a spirit of lack - not as a lack of material resources. Using Maslow’s framework, a spirit of lack is what keeps us locked in the second tier of needs. It is what creates an existential crisis. It is what causes us to trade our soul and sovereignty for perceived security. It is the root of all non-psychological mental suffering.

A spirit of lack produces a chronic and pervasive sense that something is missing - usually felt on a spectrum between vague uneasy and intense anxiety. It prompts us to seek a remedy for this feeling outside of ourselves. This leads to chasing distractions, coping mechanisms, and external validation. A spirit of lack makes us consumptive rather than generative (which on a mass scale is consumer capitalism). A spirit of lack makes us feel like we are perpetually losing; playing from behind.

And herein we find one of God’s many riddles: lack of presence produces a feeling of something is missing and that something missing is presence!

Lack of presence is experiencing a moment outside of yourself - present only in the sense that you can notice what seems to be wrong or missing. Presence reveals that we almost always have more resources and power and control than we realized. And if there is a lack of material resources, presence makes that clear. In that form, presence becomes acceptance which becomes resourcefulness and action.