Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that being truly present in the moment is more valuable and complex than simply being productive.
Maria Popova emphasizes the importance of presence over productivity, highlighting that the ability to engage fully in the moment requires more skill and nuance than just focusing on achieving tasks. It suggests that real fulfillment and richness in life come from being aware and attentive to our experiences rather than rushing through them to complete a checklist of activities.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a mindfulness workshop to emphasize the value of being present.
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.
Our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - which, ironically, is critical to both our creativity and the richness of our lives - leads us to lock down safe, comfortable, familiar interpretations, even if they are only partial representations of or fully disconnected from reality.
Everything is a subject. Every subject has a rhythm. To feel it is the raison detre. The photograph is a fixed moment of such a raison detre, which lives on in itself.
The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Guitar was just a hobby, but it seemed to me that the instrument had possibilities, not least of which was that there was no one else playing it. I could be, as it were, the best boy in an all-girls school.
It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.
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