One of the most fundamental emotions, and yet one of the most difficult to define, is presence.
The therapist Richard Nicastro describes the emotional presence he witnessed being offered by one friend to another as follows: “It’s hard to actually put this into words without it sounding like what was offered could be reduced to good eye contact. It went way beyond this. From the next table I could feel this woman’s presence as she sat with her friend.”
It wasn’t advice that proved the presence, Nicastro explains. “One of the women was upset about something and she clearly needed someone to talk to. What struck me is what this woman’s friend did. She didn’t offer any magical words, no grand wisdom, no packaged solutions or suggestions about what direction her distressed friend should take.”
What the friend provided, Nicastro says, was a combination of immersion, openness and connection. It’s a full experience of emotional availability, a willingness to take in not only the sensory information of what’s happening, but also the subjective significance of it all.
The tactical signals of emotional presence can be imitated by a computer in forms such as companion robots and automated texts, but true emotional presence can never be summoned by a digital machine. That’s because emotional presence isn’t just a service that can be performed. It is a feeling, and feelings don’t exist unless they are felt.
The experience of emotional presence is encapsulated in the Buddhist admonition: Be here now.
What’s captured in this popular saying is the realization that presence takes place at the nexus of time and space. It’s about being where you are, when you are.
Presence is the feeling of a full commitment. Of course, in a literal sense, it’s impossible for a brain to be completely dedicated to any single place or time. That’s because a brain is a system that does many things at once. Even when we seem to focus our consciousness totally on just one thing, as in meditation, our brains are working on other things at the same time, and even comparing them to that apparently singular place and time.
Nonetheless, emotional presence isn’t about the facts of neurology. It’s about the subjective experience on its own terms. No moment and no place can ever be separated from other times and spaces, but so what? It’s what happens to us on the inside, and to our relationships with settings and people when we practice emotional presence, that matters.
