What does it mean to be truly present?
Some would say it’s simply being where you are.
Others would argue it’s being engaged in what is happening right now.
Eckhart Tolle once gave me an idea that changed the way I look at everything. He said to notice the space between things.
The furniture in a room feels like the room, yet it only makes up a fraction of it. Most of what is there is what he called space or nothing: NO THING.
From then on, observing space became a game for me.
A massive tree with its trunk, limbs, branches, and leaves looks solid, full, impenetrable. But if you really consider it, it is mostly air woven through form.
I’ve hit golf balls into trees that should have stopped them cold…
yet somehow the ball finds its way through untouched.
Everyone says, How did that not hit anything?
Maybe the better question is:
How does it ever hit anything, when space is most of what the tree is?
Back to Eckhart.
He talked about words and sound.
Notice the silence between them.
A bird chirps, a car passes, someone speaks — but the actual noise occupies so little of time. The quiet is always there, holding it all.
The nothing.
The NO THING.
I practice this sometimes. I listen for the pause between words. Try it — it’s almost shocking when you notice it. Even in music, notes begin and end, but what gives them meaning is the space that allows them to be heard. Without the pause, there is no song.
Scripture whispers here
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
— Psalm 46:10
Stillness is not the absence of God. It may be the place He is easiest to find.
So presence might be this:
the slow of the slow,
a gentle suspension of time,
an awareness resting underneath everything that moves.
It is always here.
Beneath the rush.
Beneath the thinking.
Beneath the noise we mistake for life.
And in that quiet foundation, maybe we discover something that was never missing.
God.
Not louder than the chaos.
Not competing for attention.
But faithful.
Steady.
Unmoving.
The background of being itself. The being of being.
And when I fall into that silence, even for a moment, I realize I am not alone, not lost, not separate.
I am held inside the same Presence that holds the stars.
Closing Prayer
Father,
teach me to love the quiet places.
Help me notice the spaces that hold my life together.
When noise pulls me away, call me back to stillness where You remain.
Let me find You not only in what is happening, but in the holy pause beneath it all.
Amen.
