The antihero’s most fundamental task is to cultivate a deep, resilient peace within themselves amid great turmoil and upheaval in the world. Only from that peace can they fully confront the devastation of the polycrisis and do something meaningful about it.
In Chapter 2, we explored a few practices that can aid us in this process. But these practical energy resets are only the first steps.
True, sustained, resilient, oceanic peace is the result of a much deeper, more essential process. To cultivate that kind of peace, we need our most timeless, universal tool: presence.
Presence is the foundation of just about every major spiritual or contemplative practice since the dawn of humanity. Buddhist mindfulness, contemplative Christian prayer, Sufi dhikr, Taoist stillness practice — disparate traditions from different eras and corners of the world converge on the same core practice: attention to the present moment. Any meditation, any ritual, any prayer is a practice in focusing on and honoring what is here, right now.
At its core, presence is simply existing fully in and sensing into the present moment, free from rumination about the past or worrying about or trying to plan for the future. Presence is the state of being in the now, our capacity to be in the now, an energy we exude from living in the now.
It is through presence that we find the deepest peace.
Suffering is almost always about our relationship to the past or future. We experience pain, grief, and fear as difficult, confronting sensations in our body. But we only truly suffer from them when we wrap them in a story about the past or future – perhaps about how past traumas broke us irreparably, or about how there is no hope for future recovery.
Presence cannot free us from pain. But it can free us from that suffering, the story we tell ourselves about the pain. It reminds us that the past and future are constructs of our mind. It reminds us that everything that ever existed and ever will exist exists in the now.
