By Paul Yung
A few weeks ago, my daughter Adelia graduated from kindergarten. One week later, she started big school. That one week absolutely broke me.
I know that sounds dramatic. She was starting school, not moving overseas! I should have been excited. Instead, I found myself grieving. I was grieving the little girl she used to be. The kindergarten years. The random weekday afternoons together. The freedom of taking her away whenever we wanted. Suddenly, a chapter of our lives had ended, and nobody had asked me if I was ready.
The funny thing is, I knew this was coming. At the beginning of this year, I deliberately planned eight holidays in eight months because I knew once Adelia started school, our freedom to travel together would change. I wanted to maximise my time with her.
But I realised something uncomfortable. Sometimes, while I was on one holiday, I was already planning the next one. I was physically there, but mentally somewhere else.
And when graduation came, I realised that no amount of reminiscing could bring those moments back.
That experience taught me something that I now call **hyperpresence**.
Being present is putting your phone away. Hyperpresence is closing all the other mental tabs too. It means that if I have chosen to spend the next hour playing football with my children, then for that hour, nothing else matters. I am not thinking about tomorrow’s meeting, checking emails in my head or planning the weekend.
If I am in a meeting, I am in that meeting. If I am having dinner with someone, that person gets all of me. If I am playing with my children, I am not CEO, entrepreneur or anything else. I am Daddy.
Simple, right? Not really.
Our brains seem permanently trained for somewhere else. We replay yesterday’s conversations. We worry about tomorrow’s problems. We sit at dinner thinking about work, then sit at work wishing we had more time with our families. We spend so much time everywhere except where we actually are.
There is a beautiful Japanese concept called *ichigo ichie*, which can be understood as “one time, one meeting.” The idea is that every encounter is unique and will never happen again in exactly the same way. I love that.
I might pick Adelia up from school hundreds of times. It might feel like the same drive, the same traffic, the same route home. But it isn’t.
She will be one day older. I will be one day older. Maybe she will tell me something funny that happened at school. Maybe she will be excited about something she learned. Maybe she will be upset and need Daddy to listen. One day, without me realising it, I will pick her up from school for the last time.
That’s *ichigo ichie*. And hyperpresence is how I am learning to live it.
Interestingly, it has changed the way I work too. I used to think productivity meant doing more things with the same amount of time. Now I realise that sometimes productivity means giving one thing your complete attention.
When someone walks into my office with a problem, I try not to simultaneously think about the next meeting. When someone is speaking, I try to listen without preparing my response.
When I’m playing football, I play football.
I’m certainly not perfect at it. My mind still wanders. My phone still calls for attention. I still catch myself opening those mental tabs. But now I notice. And I come back. Maybe that is the point.
We spend so much of life waiting for the next thing. The next holiday. The next promotion.
The next milestone. The next weekend.
Then one day, we look backwards and realise that the ordinary moments we were rushing through were actually the moments we would give anything to experience again.
Your school run today will not be exactly the same tomorrow. The colleague sitting across from you will not always work with you. Your parents will not always be the age they are today. Your children will not always reach for your hand.
There is nothing wrong with planning for tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with remembering yesterday. Just don’t let either steal today. Perhaps that’s why we call it the present. It really is a gift.
The future deserves our preparation. The past deserves our gratitude. But the present deserves our presence.
