Emily Articulated: Presentness

By Emily Erickson
Reader Staff

The holidays often prompt a lot of reflection, turning me inward as much as pulling me outward. Maybe it’s the ritual of stringing lights and pulling ornaments out of boxes — my arm at once a 3-year-old’s, hanging my popsicle stick creation on a pine bough, and also a 33-year-old’s, straightening the gold bauble I found at a Goodwill off the highway somewhere in Montana.

This year, I’ve been ruminating on the idea of presentness — those experiences that grip us, demanding our full attention, either through their sheer magnitude or by our own effort to tune in, moment by moment.

Most often, this presentness is joyful. But sometimes, we’re reluctantly present, wishing for an escape or a good daydream, but settle, instead, on surrender. Lately, the most present I’ve been was in the chair at my dentist’s office with oversized sunglasses cutting into my cheeks. I could make out a shadowy, masked face, backlit by the giant overhead light, as his too-large hands and sharp surgical tools prodded my bare gums.

“So, what are your plans for Christmas?” he asked, using his thumb and forefinger to ratchet open my mouth wider.

Emily Erickson. Courtesy photo.

“Family,” I garbled out before he moved my tongue aside to make way for the large anesthesia-filled needle.

“This isn’t going to hurt, exactly,” he continued, “but you are going to feel a lot of pressure… and there will be some noise.”

Over the next four hours, he cracked bone and tooth, pulling fragments from too-deep root canals, and installed — yes, like shelving — two stumps of metal into my jawbone. And as I lay there — prone, with the sounds of a construction site pounding inside my head — I thought:

“There are few experiences more vulnerable than being at the dentist’s office,” and this is coming from a person who’s endured regular PAP exams since I was a teenager. (Maybe I’m just more confident in the clamping power of my quads than my molars.) 

But, in all that vulnerability, was total presentness; an acute awareness of every sound and smell and slowly ticking minute. It was a strange revelation: presentness comes in all sorts of packages.

The presentness of the dentist’s office exists in the same world as the first handful of buttery movie theater popcorn or the feeling of finishing a marathon. It sits alongside fireside conversations, the expansion of my chest at the sound of someone playing piano and the glide of waxed skis against new snow. 

Presentness is the gasp of pain at the poke of a long needle but also the deep breaths, the belly laughs and the roar at the top of my lungs at a football game. The breadth of all that human experience is nothing short of amazing.

The holidays, of course, invite their own kind of presentness. It’s in the pangs of grief as you hang a stocking for someone no longer here — how many winters will we do this, I wonder? It’s in the quiet joy of hanging the first stocking for someone newly added to the family. It’s the sweetness of sneaking a fingerful of sugar frosting from a recipe passed down for generations, each woman whispering to her daughter that “a squeeze of lemon is the secret.” And it’s the visceral cringe at an off-color joke from that uncle you only see every few years — and are perfectly fine with that.

There’s vulnerability in all that presentness — an opening up, a softening of our guard, so we can take in the fullness of what life is offering. Like the lemon in the frosting, maybe leaning into that vulnerability is the secret ingredient. It’s how we find our way back to one another, how we hold on to the moments that will live in us long after they’ve passed.

This holiday season, I hope you find reasons to lean into presentness. Whether it’s the sweetness of powdered sugar on your tongue, the crackle of logs in a fire, or the hush of fresh snow underfoot, I hope you feel it fully. And when presentness pulls you to its uncomfortable edges — moments that ache, stretch or linger like a drill in your jaw — may you come through them with a clearer, fuller view of the beautiful, messy breadth of it all.

Here’s to your days having more snowy mornings and plates of cookies than long, pointy needles, and may your present(nes)s come in all shapes and sizes. I wish you the happiest of holidays this year.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.