Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Real Life

Melissa Kite

Wednesday, 16th July 2008

Living in the now

Have you ever attempted to open the front door to your house by pointing your car key at it? Please say you have. I did it twice this week and what is worse it took me ages to work out why the door was not opening, despite frantic clicking of the Peugeot key in the direction of the Yale lock. I shudder to think that a passing neighbour might have seen me.

The reason for my befuddlement, it turns out, is that whatever I happen to be doing, I am not there as I’m doing it. This is all to do with something fantastically new-fangled called ‘being present’. I hadn’t spotted it myself — as I refuse on principle to read books called The Power of Now. But a couple of friends have been instrumental in diagnosing the problem.

The first pulled me up sharp as I was sitting not listening to him tell me about something that happened to him at work that day. ‘Where are you?’ he asked. I assured him that I was sitting right opposite him. ‘No, you’re not. You’re somewhere else.’

He was absolutely right. After a bit of exploration it transpired that I was in fact sitting in my car three days previously, trying to work out how to get my parking permit attached to the windscreen. I was reliving the awful moment when I peeled the permit away from the paper and stuck it to the sticky holder the wrong way.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page