A significant portion of your inner life is not experience. It is simulation. You run through what might happen. You prepare for conversations that may not occur. You build scenarios and populate them with outcomes. You process events before they exist and after they have passed.
The present moment, the one actually in front of you, is often the least inhabited of the three. This is not planning. Planning has a specific outcome and a specific purpose. What you are doing is more diffuse. It is a continuous simulation of living. You are in the meeting, but also already preparing for what you will say about the meeting later. You are with the person, but also watching yourself being with the person. The simulation feels productive. It feels like engagement. But you can simulate for years and not move.
The rehearsal is not the action. The mental preparation is not the conversation. The internal processing of the event is not the event. There is a quality of experience that is only available in unmediated contact with what is actually happening. Not through the layer of commentary and preparation and review. Not through the narrative you are building about it. In it.
That quality is largely absent from a life lived primarily in simulation. You have spent a great deal of time preparing to live. The preparation does not expire. You arrive at one rehearsal having left another.
The actual performance, the moment where you are simply present with no layer between you and it, is rarer than you think.
