How to Be Here

by Rob Bell

  Have you ever gotten really angry about something trivial like a drawer in the kitchen not working right or something falling off the shelf in the garage and you find yourself wondering, Where did all that anger come from?

  It built up from days and days of moving too quickly, absorbing all the pain and anguish the world throws at us that we don’t have time in the moment to think about and work through. It accumulates in our hearts, our cells, our psyches, expressing itself at the strangest times.

  You’re not that angry about the drawer in the kitchen. The drawer simply gave you an outlet for all the grief and pain sitting right below the surface of your life.

  Sabbath forces you to listen to your life.

  Sabbath is a day when you are fully present to your pain, your stress, your worry, your fear.

  Sabbath is when you let whatever you’ve pushed down rise to the surface.

  Sabbath is a day when things that are broken get fixed, when things within you that have torn are mended.

  Your Groove

  What most surprised me when we started practicing Sabbath is how much it affected the other six days. Sabbath leaks. The growing sanity of this one day exposed the insanity of the others.

  When you begin to practice a rhythm to your week, you begin to see the need for rhythm all the time.

  For example, lunch.

  You sit down to eat with a friend and she puts her phone on the table between the two of you with the screen facing up. Without saying anything verbally, she has just communicated to you that even though she is here, with you at the lunch, about to order food, if that phone rings and that screen lights up, she will be with you, but not be with you. Here but not here. In that moment as she glances down at the screen she will be making a decision about whether to answer or not.

  This extraordinary technology that makes it possible for us to connect with someone on the other side of the world also disconnects us from the person on the other side of the table.

  To live with rhythm requires that you be intentional about what you’re doing and when you’re doing it.

  If you’re with a person,

  then be with him, be with her.

  If you’re making phone calls,

  then make phone calls.

  If you’re playing with your kids,

  then play with your kids.

  If you’re having lunch and talking,

  then be there. Put your cell phone away.

  I’m going to type a word in the next line and when you read it, notice the first feeling or associations that come to mind. Ready?

  Inbox.

  Were you instantly at ease, relaxed, struck with how much that word calmed you? Probably not. If you’re like me, your first association with that word is a number—the number of emails that have come in since you last checked your inbox.

  Emails are piling up while you read or listen to this book. Emails you will respond to . . . later. Do you see what just happened? In the course of a few sentences, you went from interacting with this book to also thinking about your emails, which you will deal with in the future.

  People didn’t used to have email inboxes. We have literally invented new ways to be stressed.

  When do you deal with your email?

  All the time?

  Three times a day?

  Constantly?

  Is how you spend your day determined by who sends you emails and when they send them?

  Or do you have set times when you deal with your email?

  When is your cell phone on?

  When is it off?

  When can’t we get ahold of you?

  When don’t you answer your phone because you’re doing something?

  Can we call you and interrupt what you’re doing anytime of the day?

  When are you working and when are you not working?

  Central to creating a life worth living is understanding that you have more power over your time than you realize.

  Inhale, exhale.

  On, off.

  Work, play.

  Stepping in, stepping back.

  You create the rhythm that helps you do the work that you’re here to do.

  Everyone I know who’s been on their path for a while and thriving more than ever has details and routines they take seriously. Some people begin each day with a walk, others sit in silence for a set period of time every afternoon, some eat at the same restaurant every weekday for lunch, others wear an outfit or uniform when they work, some say prayers at certain times, some go for a run in the late afternoon.

  How you order your time, how you arrange the physical space you work in, what you wear, the tools you use, the food you eat and the times you eat it, the people you meet with at set times—all these details matter.

  Think about your rituals and routines like a muscle that you are building, each repetition making that muscle stronger and more resilient.

  As you find your groove, knowing what part of the day this is and what you do and don’t do in this part of the day, you will find yourself getting better at dealing with the unexpected debris that inevitably comes flying your direction.

  We Have This Morning

  When Kristen and I were engaged, we registered for wedding gifts. And I learned in the process that you’re supposed to have two kinds of plates.

  Everyday plates. And then plates that you use only once in a while, for special occasions. These plates are called Fine China.

  I also learned that when you register for things, you actually get a lot of those things. We received those two kinds of plates. The plates we use every day, and this second set of plates that we use only now and again. Those plates, the ones we seldom use, are for big occasions, big celebrations.

  We used them once or twice a year.

  And then we started practicing Sabbath. And I started to be more present, less distracted, less and less there and more and more here. And the more here I was, the more I learned that all we have is the present. All we have is today.

  This is obvious, true, and revolutionary if you take it seriously.

  So if you come over to my house tomorrow morning, and I’m making breakfast, you’ll notice that we go all-out for breakfast.

  Eggs, bacon (bacon: not that good for the body, but really good for the soul), sometimes French toast or pancakes, fresh smoothies—

  we do it right.

  And then you’ll notice that we eat breakfast on the Fine China.

  Because this day is all we have.

  We are celebrating.

  This morning.

  We have this morning.

  That’s it.

  There is power in the details,

  power in this moment,

  power in treating this meal as the sacred gift that it is.

  Find your rituals,

  develop your routines,

  create those practices that ground and center you.

  Stick to them,

  don’t apologize for them,

  treat them, even the small things, like they’re big things.

  Because they are.

  They’re huge.

  There’s power there.

  Power in the details,

  power in the ritual,

  power in the routines,

  power in those plates.

  PART 9

  The Exploding Burrito

  The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

  —Abraham Joshua Heschel

  In the summer of 2000 I hit my head.

  Actually, I hit my head several times. I was waterskiing, trying to learn a wakeboard trick called a Tantrum (just the name tells you the
re’s going to be trouble . . .). It’s a trick in which you jump the boat’s wake and—still holding on to the rope—do a backflip, landing on the other side of the wake.

  I was very focused on landing that trick that summer, and on this one particular Thursday in August I attempted ten or fifteen in a row. I wasn’t getting it, and I repeatedly fell, the back of my head smacking the water each time.

  Eventually I got in the boat to take a break, and that’s when things got weird. Apparently, I wasn’t making any sense, because my friend Kent asked me what day of the week it was. The last thing I remember is looking at him and saying, I have no idea what day it is . . .

  Later I was told that Kent and MikeTheBoatDriver took me back to the dock, led me to the passenger seat of my car, and then drove me to the hospital. Kristen met us there, where we learned that I had a closed head injury, also known as a concussion. (Who gets a concussion from hitting their head on water?). I should say they learned, because I was out of it. I don’t remember going back to the dock or driving to the hospital or talking to the doctor or any of it.

  The first thing I do remember is being driven home, turning the corner onto our street and somehow going from being out of it to being in it—in it like never before.

  Here’s what I mean by being in it like never before: Let’s say you’re talking with your neighbor and as you’re chatting about last week’s heat wave you hear a dog bark a few houses over and you wonder whether that’s the same dog you pass by on your morning run and just then your phone rings in your pocket while you notice a scratch on the bumper of your car that you hadn’t noticed until now while you’re responding to whatever your neighbor just said about the dust that’s been building up on her windows while you note that the temperature is dropping because the sun is about to set and you remember that you still need to wash the carrots that you put in the sink before you went outside to get the mail and saw your neighbor . . .

  Dogs,

  bumpers,

  windows,

  carrots.

  Sound familiar? You’re standing there, physically present with your neighbor, but your mind is ping-ponging from one thought to another, noticing sounds and colors, processing random events from earlier in the day, connecting whatever your neighbor just said about the dust on her windows to the dust on your windows which reminds you that you need to take out the recycling when that thought is interrupted by remembering how you still haven’t responded to that text about plans for Friday night—

  You’re there, but you’re also not there.

  You’re in that place, at that time, standing there in the street, and yet—in a way that is hard to describe but very real—somewhere in your being you’re also not there.

  But in that moment coming home from the hospital when we turned the corner onto our street, I was there, in the front seat of the car, and nowhere else. Whatever it was that the concussion did to my brain, I wasn’t able to think about anything that wasn’t directly in front of me. The color of our house, the grass in the yard, the furniture as I walked in the back door—I noticed all of it, like everything was in slow motion and every detail was on fire.

  It was familiar—I knew at some level that I’d been in this place before—but it was also unfamiliar, like I was seeing it all for the first time.

  Imagine getting a tour of your life, as if you were observing your life from outside of your life. It had all the comfort and security of something I knew, but the electricity and thrill of something I hadn’t encountered before.

  And then our boys came into the room. I looked at Kristen and said, These are our kids? She told me their names as I stared at them. They were the most captivating, exotic creatures in the universe to me. I couldn’t stop tearing up. I kept looking around, repeating, This is our life?

  I asked Kristen about my job and where we went to school and how long we’d been married as if I didn’t know the answers, even though the answers she gave resonated with what I already knew at some sort of cellular level, as if they were stored not in my mind but somewhere else in my being. She told me how we met and where we had lived in Los Angeles and I listened like it was the most interesting story I’d ever heard. Because it was.

  I was on the edge of my seat hearing about my life, the life I had been living in the first place.

  My friend Tomaas told me years later that he stopped by on that first day I was home and when he walked in the front door I was sitting in a chair, staring at my hand. He said that I watched it for a while and then turned to him and said, Isn’t it amazing?

  You know how shafts of sunlight stream through the window and you can see specks of dust floating in the air? (And your first thought is I should vacuum more.) I would focus on a single speck and follow it as it drifted leisurely down toward the floor, as if it were the only thing on my mind. Because it was. Literally. Ten or twenty minutes at a time with no other thought running through my mind but that one. particle. of. dust.

  Kristen made me a burrito and when I took the first bite, I had to put my fork down because of how startling it was. I could taste all of the spices one at a time, and yet also at the same time. Each one, and the whole, together, simultaneously and separately.

  Now I know what you’re thinking at this point—you’re thinking, Yes, Rob, this is why some people do drugs.

  Well said. And true. But there’s more to it.

  My brain was busy remembering, reorienting itself and plugging back in all those wires that got yanked out when I hit my head. (I’m sure there’s a neurologist somewhere who just read that last sentence and shook her head and thought, It’s way more complicated than that . . .). And because my mind was so occupied on the task at hand, it didn’t have energy for the many other tasks that it normally performs.

  Like thinking about the past. Regret, anxiety, ruminating on things I wished I’d done differently—I didn’t have any of that because all that was back there, in the past, and I was only capable of being right here, in the present.

  Or thinking about the future. All that worry and stress that we carry around, thinking about what might happen and how things might unfold and what might go wrong was up there, ahead in time. And that was simply absent from my mind.

  I could only be present. And the present was enough. It wasn’t just enough, it was more than enough. It was overwhelming. The burrito wasn’t just food, it was an explosion of sensation. The boys weren’t just our kids, they were luminous and ineffably wondrous miracles of flesh and bone. Everything wasn’t just our house and family and friends and life, it was a massive, majestic, complex, electrified gift that floored me with its radiance and vitality, filling me with overflowing gratitude. It was profoundly satisfying and more than I could bear, all of it charged and energized in all its Technicolor splendor.

  I’m grasping at language here, trying to describe how transcendent and awe-inspiring it was to see things as they are in their fullness without distractions or guilt or chattering inner dialogue or comparing myself to others or wondering whether there’s a better life somewhere else or wandering thoughts or any urgency to get to the next thing on the list or the next event on the calendar or the next email that needs a response.

  There was no rushing, no racing, no frantic dash to grab car keys or get somewhere on time. Time itself warped and slowed around me, creating a serene stillness.

  All I had was now, and now was enough. It wasn’t just enough, it was more than enough.

  Presence

  My life at the time was packed. Busy. Stressed. I was racing from one thing to another. We had a young family, the lawn needed to be mowed and the bills paid and diapers changed. We had just started a church. I was giving sermons and going to meetings and visiting people in hospitals and doing funerals and hiring staff and writing letters and discussing budgets. Around that time I did three weddings on one Saturday. That kind of packed. Every moment was scheduled. I would drive home from work and make calls that I hadn’t had time to make during the da
y at the office and I’d still be talking when I got home so I’d sit in the garage still in the car trying to finish the conversation while my two-year-old son stood in the doorway wondering why I wasn’t coming inside.

  And then I hit my head.

  And I couldn’t work or accomplish anything. I’d sit there day after day, staring at my hand or a speck of dust, raving to whoever would listen about how magical and electric and sacred and amazing it all is.

  If you had stopped by the house during that week I was recovering, you would have heard me ramble for five minutes and thought, He is so out of it.

  But I was also so in it—in the moment, in the present, in my life—more than I’d ever been before.

  I hadn’t just tasted a burrito more fully, I had tasted life more fully.

  And it changed me. Over the next week my memory gradually came back as the effects of the concussion wore off, but something had shifted within me.

  I learned that my life—

  my average, ordinary, routine, everyday life—

  has infinite depth and dimension and meaning and significance.

  I learned that the present moment, with all its pressure and heartbreak and work and struggle and tension and questions and concerns, is way more interesting and compelling and mysterious and even enjoyable than I had ever imagined.

  You and I were raised in a modern world that taught us how to work hard and be productive and show up on time and give it our best. We learned at an early age that our grades in high school mattered because that was what colleges look at, and our work in college mattered because that’s how we were going to get good jobs, and how hard we worked at those first jobs determined how fast we would climb the ladder and get ahead in our careers.

  And so, for many of us, that’s what we did. We put in the hours and saved our money and stayed late at the office because that’s what one did to be successful.

  But all that left us missing something. We were stressed. Distracted. Busy. Feeling like life was passing us by. We had a full schedule, but not a full heart.