When you are fully in the present moment and focus on your sensory perception, you will experience the world around you in more detail than can be described in words. You notice the small mist swirling over the surface of the coffee. The tiny air bubble on the rim of the cup reflects all the spectral colors, unmistakably and clearly. If you are mindful, you will automatically drink the first sip at the perfect temperature. You won’t be distracted and sip it while it’s still too hot.
Turkish coffee in particular can sit for a bit before you drink it. The grounds settle, and the surface gets a film, reminiscent of a salt desert, but less grainy. Even the preparation is perceived differently, when you are in that stage. You recognize the moment when the coffee starts to simmer before it even appears to your eyes. You hear clearly how the boiling sound suddenly becomes silent before it starts boiling. That is the silence of the coffee.
Your lips feel the rim of the cup, and you see its contour in your mind’s eye. Without a doubt, you notice whether it is a fine or thick-walled cup, a detail you don’t normally focus on. You perceive the coffee with all your senses. You feel the weight of the cup. You smell the aroma. The word “full-bodied” suddenly becomes a solid whole that you can imagine exactly as you feel the body and contour of the coffee in your mouth. When you are fully in this moment, and not just your body but also your mind is drinking the coffee, then you also hear the sound, the quiet bubbling, maybe a gentle slurping that you make while drinking. You hear and feel exactly what you see when you place the cup on the table. It’s a duller, softer sound on soft wood. It’s a muffled sound when you place your cup on a tablecloth. It’s a cold, hard, and sharp sound on glass or stone.
The word “experience” describes a moment in your life that you actually perceive. The moment has your attention, and you grasp all its facets. Experiencing with all your senses is the most comprehensive thing you can perceive. When you are fully in the present moment, not just in the present day or hour but right now, a world of diversity and depth opens up to you. A world so rich in details that it’s hard to describe, but easy to experience.
Being in the present moment, despite the clearest clarity you can achieve, is a trance-like feeling. There is no time. There are no thoughts of yesterday or tomorrow. The voice within you is silent; the speaking part of your brain takes a break. It’s the older parts of the brain that don’t need language.
In everyday life, you hardly reach this state. The life around you is too hectic, timed, and organized. You live in an environment full of bittersweet distractions that are too tempting to allow you to forget them. Without being aware of it, you still know this state of clarity. When you sleep with someone with whom you share a deeper connection, you eventually stop thinking in words. You experience. Suddenly, you only perceive with your senses. You hear the breath, you see the goosebumps. You read facial expressions and body language as you read words in everyday life: completely clear and intuitive. You feel in every movement what is happening in your counterpart. You speak, like any other animal, completely naturally and without words, in a completely clear language. Only after you calm down and let the younger parts of your brain work again, you become aware of what you have just filtered out. You become aware that there was background music, and you completely filtered it out. You realize that your sense of time is often surprisingly inaccurate because you don’t perceive time in that moment. You notice that you actually had complaints, tiredness, muscle aches, headaches that suddenly seem to play no role anymore.
When you sleep with another person, it is easy for you to be fully in the present moment. In everyday tasks though, it is much harder to get there. It is hard to perceive the preparation and enjoyment of a cup of coffee in this wholeness. Most of the time, you do this in a routine that is completely automatic. Too often your coffee is just an afterthought, a background noise while your mind is trapped in a screen, too distracted to properly pay attention. You have forgotten your coffee once or twice and it got cold, haven’t you?
Your mind is always in one place and always at one time. And so is your body. Only when the place and time of your mind meet with those of your body, are you in the present and ready to be mindful.