Anywhere But Here

From Menletter September 2011

By Tim Baehr

Dorothy traipsed all over Oz having adventures she couldn't imagine having on Auntie Em's old farm with its boring old family and silly old neighbors. In the end, however, she found out that the Wizard was just a charlatan (but a wise one), and she clicked her red shoes together and said, "There’s no place like home." Shazaam! She woke up from her delirium and was happy to be where she started from.

Where are you right now? Look around at your surroundings: a chair in your den, a subway car, in bed, in the - uh - bathroom. Expand that location. You're in a town, in a state, in a country, in a continent, on Earth, in the solar system, in a galaxy, in the universe. Imagine you could travel at the speed of light for several years. How much closer would you be to the end of all space as we know it? Not very. Hardly at all. Our universe is so vast that it may as well be infinite. It is so vast that you can consider yourself at its center, and no matter how far you traveled, you’d still be at the center. But right here, and right now, you are exactly where you are. Wherever you go, there you are.

So what are we doing in our heads? We let our minds drift to other locations, putting ourselves someplace else. Anywhere but here. And the drifting is so unconscious that most of the time we don't know we're doing it. We're at the office, but our minds are on a beach. We're on the beach, but our minds are wondering what's going on at the office (are we not indispensable after all?). We're in the middle of foreplay, and our minds are in the garage, tinkering with our latest project. We're in the garage, and our minds are in the bedroom with some hottie we saw on the subway.

There are times when mentally being someplace else is useful. If we're planning a route to a new friend's house for the first time, it helps to visualize the streets and turns. Recalling an island vacation, and sharing photos with friends, can let us revisit a pleasurable place. In these and other useful mental relocations, however, it's important not to get caught up in them. We could run a stop sign while visualizing an unfamiliar route, and we could live so fully on the island of our dreams that we miss the beauty around us now.

But a lot of the time we just drift into reveries of the anywhere-but-here. Maybe we could call this drifting phenomenon daydreaming. Why do we never daydream about being right where we are, right now? I think it may have something (O.K., a lot) to do with idealism. Our minds are always seeking some ideal, and right here seems so . . . mundane. Even when it involves absorbing work, a postcard-pretty beach, fabulous sex, attention to sharp tools (ouch!), or nookie with a magazine model. Except on rare occasions, right here never seems to measure up. It's as if our mind is constantly saying, "Is that all there is?"

How do we wake up from our own delirium? One way is to do meditation. If we do meditation just for its own sake - and that’s not easy, I know - we are, for twenty minutes or so, inescapably right where we are. Because we're in a state that’s calmer than usual, we're more likely to notice our mentally drifting off to other places. And we can then practice bringing ourselves back to Here. We could also try, for a few minutes a day, to be aware of our drifting and to bring ourselves into the present place, noticing and appreciating the sight, sound, feel, and smell of our surroundings. With these kinds of practices, we'll have more opportunities to be present in the endless Here of our everyday lives. And from time to time, we may sense the joy and fascination of just being where we are.