Being present has always been a recurring theme in conversations, especially in Buddhism. We hear it often, yet rarely pause to truly examine what it means.
I still remember a quote from Kung Fu Panda:
The past is history, the future is a mystery, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.
For a long time, this idea stayed with me as a concept, something understood intellectually, but not fully felt. Until one evening in Singapore.
It was dusk.
I was walking through a quiet interchange toward a dinner place. The usual traffic noise had softened. Large trees lined the road. Only a handful of people were around. The environment felt calm, almost suspended in time.
And then, something clicked.
At that exact moment, it was only me within my immediate surroundings, bounded by what my eyes could see, what my ears could hear, what my body could feel, smell, and sense. Five senses. A finite box.
Everything outside that box existed only in my mind.
That’s when I realized how fascinating and dangerous the mind can be.
It is limitless. It travels instantly. It pulls us thousands of miles away from where our body stands.
In that same moment, my mind drifted to my mother. How was she doing? Was she okay?
Yet the truth was uncomfortable:
I couldn’t do anything about it in that moment.
She couldn’t feel my concern.
She couldn’t receive my emotions.
She had no awareness that I was even thinking about her.
Not because I didn’t care, but because my senses weren’t connected to her.
And then it became clearer.
This applies to everything.
No matter how strong our emotional connections are to family, friends, or loved ones, our ability to perceive, respond, and act is limited to what exists inside our sensory boundary.
The present moment exists only when the mind aligns with the senses.
The moment my attention drifts outside that boundary, replaying the past, worrying about the future, imagining distant scenarios, I am no longer fully present. My eyes may still see, my ears may still hear, but without mental attention, those experiences pass through me unnoticed.
Situational awareness disappears.
Even as I write this now, I’m aware of another truth:
This moment belongs only to me.
No one knows I’m writing this until I publish it.
Even after publishing, I won’t know how it’s received unless I return to it through my senses by reading comments, seeing reactions, or engaging with it again.
Until then, my mind is no longer present with this article.
And that, perhaps, is the simplest definition I’ve come to understand:
The present moment exists only when the mind acts upon what the senses can directly interact with.
Everything else, no matter how meaningful lives somewhere else.
There is still much more to understand about presence.
But this realization stayed with me.
And maybe, if you pause for a moment right now
notice what you can see, hear, and feel
you might find yourself exactly where you already are.
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