Nate Hagens

Doesn't mean don't reach, just acknowledge when you reach that you are reaching and what that reaching takes you away from, which is almost always this right here, the thing you actually have.

but didn't realize you had or appreciated it.

The third suggestion is single tasking.

And then we have this ideology of multitasking, which I think is one of the great lies of late stage industrial era.

The brain actually does not do two attentional tasks at once.

It switches between them badly at a large cognitive cost.

To eat while reading while half listening to a podcast while glancing at the phone is

in reality is to do four things poorly and to be fully present for none of them.

Choose one, whatever you're doing, try to do it as the only thing.

I know this is very good advice.

But this entire episode might also be a self-help guide from Nate to Nate because it's less easy for me to actually do these things.

But I am trying.

The fourth is beauty.

And Ian McGilchrist highlighted this in a recent podcast that the human nervous system is built to be arrested by beauty.

The Oriole eating the orange you put out for it.

The way the wind moves a particular tree branch.

The face of someone you love when they don't know you're looking.

Frank looking at me like I'm his entire universe.

When you let yourself be stopped, when you stop, when the world offers you something like those things, that actually is the practice of presence.

Beauty, defined by you, is the present moment announcing itself.