Welcome to Presence

Hi and welcome to Presence. I’m Luke Arnold, and I’m a clinical psychologist. For those that know me more intimately, I’m called a lot of things; daddy, husband, brother, son, friend, doctor, meathead, moron, expert, smart ass, and writer just to name a few. It’s all the nouns that make me who I am to write this letter where I hope you’ll just simply call me Luke.

As I’ve been thinking about what I’m called by those who know me, I’m reminded of those descriptors when I was little. I was a loud and rambunctious youngest child with two older brothers. We lived in a neighborhood in your average Midwest suburb full of kids of all ages. Weekends were always big in our neighborhood. Every kid would get together at the Probst’s house because they had the biggest backyard and deep woods lined with bike trails. We’d meet every Saturday and even on some weeknights and play football, race bikes deep through the woods, and sometimes hang around late enough to start a hide and seek game that spanned most of the neighborhood.

It’s in these long days that I’m brought back to the power of presence. There were no distractions from technology or responsibility, just play until we got tired, heard our parents calling us home, or we realized it was getting dark and we were late for dinner. There was a certain freedom to the presence found on these days. A type of connection that really only happened when we were fully immersed in the moment. It’s a level of being present with your friends that is unencumbered by useless distractions, excessive worrying, fear of being judged, or even from responsibility besides the next ramp to clear on your bike. There’s nostalgia for me most when I think of getting lost in the moment and existing purely with those around me. I’d laugh, I’d fight, I’d compete, I’d excel, I’d fail, and I’d cry. There’s something almost spiritual about finding that level of presence where the only thing that matters is the moment. I miss those days, and I worry that we get them less and less today.

Part of that is growing up. We can’t always be fully immersed in the present. There’s responsibilities, necessary multitasks, and the inevitable distractions. There have always been various distractions for humans to shuffle through, but technology has taken things to a new level. It has brought us so many powerful advancements. Technology has made our life easier, it’s given us access to people half way across the world, and it allows us to get answers to the biggest questions in an instance. The access we have to knowledge and information is such that anyone with a phone has the entire history of the world and all the knowledge compiled across all of time in their palm. We live in an age of unprecedented access to one another and yet…

You’ve no doubt already completed this sentence in your own words. We feel more disconnected and divided than we’ve ever been. How can this be? I suppose that’s a question we may address over time in this newsletter. That answer is too nuanced, ambiguous, and detailed to answer briefly. What seems clear, though, is that in our evolution as a society, we’ve slowly drifted away from holding space to be present with each other. We’ve moved from face to face conversations with our neighbors to trolling them on message boards. We’ve moved from being confronted with differing opinions at cookouts to finding ourselves in siloed echo chambers on Facebook groups. And we’ve moved from making friends by getting involved in our local communities to finding solace to the blue light of a screen.

I promise this newsletter isn’t going to be just ranting against the ails of technology but is rather working to create a space to see the value of presence and how to incorporate it into our daily lives. I want it to be a space where we can rediscover ambiguity, nuance, and ambivalence and shy away from simplicity, dualism, and dichotomization. I see this as a space where nothing fits into a perfect paradigm and sometimes the best answer to a question will leave us with five new ones. A place that will hopefully be different from the other things you open to read on the internet; a place that really makes you think, reflect, and question.

So what do I even mean by presence? It’s an ambiguous enough title for all sorts of things. For one, I hope that’s something you define for yourself over time. For me, I start with this; presence, at its core, is one’s full immersion of experience into a moment without distraction. It’s a specific type of engagement. Then within this type of engagement, presence also contains certain pillars of behavior that are non-prescriptive in their interaction, are nonjudgmental, are empathetic, and enter the space with honesty and good faith. In time, there will be much more to say about engagement, empathy, being non-prescriptive, avoiding judgement, and the power of honesty and good faith. If you work in the mental health field, you may even recognize the overlap with Carl Rogers’ essential conditions for Client-Centered therapy. The difference here is that this has nothing to do with therapy, but is about connecting again with those around us.

You may immediately or eventually have a different definition of presence, but this is the lens from which I write this newsletter, and it is through this vantage point that I hope to tackle a myriad of topics from relationships, family, mental health, culture, politics, technology, sports, and psychology. Being a psychologist, I’ll often weave that into the fabric as well, often tying cultural issues to psychology and vice versa. While I do hope to provide a level of support in navigating the world, I also want to consistently challenge you to consider things like you haven’t before; to see your life, our society, and the world in the subtle and complex ways we’re capable of instead of just overly simplifying the issue and dichotomizing. It requires a little more thought, but it’s so worth it because if we can learn to be more present with one another then I think we’ll find a world in which we all feel a hell of a lot more connected to our friends, neighbors, and even adversaries. So…let’s get connecting.

-Luke