Being Present
How well do you know yourself?
Patience is best practiced in presence. Presence with ourselves, and presence with the people in front of us.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
In my work, I meet people on some of the hardest days of their lives. They come through the doors of our food pantry — sometimes for the first time, sometimes after losing a job, a marriage, a sense of direction. And what I’ve learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, is that a box of food is rarely the whole answer. What people often need first is someone willing to simply sit down next to them.
I used to ask everyone the same question when they walked in: “What do you need?”
And almost no one answered it directly. What I got instead were stories — how things unraveled, what the last few months looked like, the moment something finally broke. I won’t lie, early on that frustrated me. I had a job to do. There were other people waiting. I kept thinking, just answer the question.
But I eventually stopped thinking that. Because I started to understand that for a lot of people, speaking the story out loud is how they figure out the answer. Verbalizing the chaos is part of sorting through it. Once I accepted that, something in me settled. I stopped rushing. I stopped preparing my next sentence while someone was still talking. I just listened — without judgment, without advice they didn’t ask for, without signaling that I had somewhere else to be.
I was there. That’s it. Just there.
What surprised me is how rarely people experience that. Being truly heard — not evaluated, not redirected, not hurried — turns out to be its own kind of relief.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe: you can’t really offer that to someone else if you haven’t learned to offer it to yourself.
You are the only person who will be present for every single moment of your own life. Every quiet fear at 2 a.m., every private victory, every long stretch of uncertainty. Your people — your family, your friends, the ones who love you — they carry pieces of your story. But they don’t carry all of it. Only you do.
So the question I keep returning to is this: how well do I actually know myself?
We live in a culture that makes that question hard to sit with. There’s always something pulling at our attention — a notification, a feed, a podcast filling the silence in the car. And I get it. Silence can feel uncomfortable. Even a little threatening. We’ve been trained to treat every quiet moment as a gap to be filled.
But I think we’ve lost something in all that noise. There’s a kind of art in stillness that most of us have stopped practicing. A particular kind of knowing that only comes when you stop consuming long enough to just be.
For me, it’s a bike ride without headphones. A few minutes of journaling before the day starts. Sitting with a thought instead of immediately reaching for my phone. None of it is dramatic. But it adds up.
Presence — real presence — starts in solitude. And from there, it has a way of showing up everywhere else.