Last night I was lying in bed and I asked myself a question I've asked some spiritual teachers, one for which I haven't gotten a satisfying answer (or perhaps one that I could understand): what is presence. Everyone speaks about "being present", "being in the here and now" yadda yadda. I notice a difference in the quality of existence after meditating, which could be described as "being more present", but what is it? "Being less in your head" as opposed to what?
We rarely answer questions to ourselves from mulling over them, but last night I felt it: presence is not wanting to be somewhere else than you currently are. You cannot say it's "wanting to be where you currently are" because wanting is a state of lack of presence. It's also not a physical description. You can be in your head, but if you don't experience a want to be out of your head, then you are present.
Reading Goethe's Letters from Italy he strikes me as a man who is perpetually present. I'm currently at the beginning of the book, and he's travelling from Germany to Italy in carriages. He's never "Oh gosh this trip is so long, when I am gonna get to Italy?", he's constantly inspecting the clouds, the rock formations, the rivers. He does admit at times an incapacity to enjoy certain things, for example arriving to a city he visits a museum and comments that landscape paintings don't seem to have much effect on him when he is experiencing real landscapes.
When I was young a cousin of mine presented a riddle: "define nothing". It took me like ten seconds to come up with "the absence of something". In the same way, presence is what emerges from the absence of want. I'm coming to the same standard Buddhist definition (lack of desire), but I've finally come to understand it intuitively. This is why they say enlightenment is always there, it's just obscured by desire.
Then I thought: if I am in a state of not-wanting, how do I will to want what I'm doing? That's a trap, you want to want, and we should think about it as "how can I temper my avoidance towards my current activity" and the only thing I could come up was "observe your breath". That's all we can do to avoid not-wanting.
I guess I begun writing this because I'm at work and avoiding what I'm supposed to do. I guess I'll take my prescription: observe the breath, and get back to work.