Be Here Now

For the past few weeks, the first thing I reached for was my phone. The war in Lebanon — a country tied to my blood, my family, my history — had been pulling me into a loop I couldn’t escape. Twitter. Instagram. Refresh. Scroll. More images, more headlines, more anger, more grief. By the time I’d been awake twenty minutes, I was already exhausted. Already somewhere else — somewhere distant and dark and completely outside my control.

My morning practice — meditation, journaling, reading — had quietly disappeared. I hadn’t decided to stop. I just kept choosing the scroll instead.

Then, a few days ago, I tried to stop.

Not because I stopped caring. But because I realised something: I wasn’t consuming the news anymore. The news was consuming me.

So I deleted the apps. Closed the feed. And in that sudden silence, I came back to myself.

I started meditating again. Journaling. Reading literature instead of headlines. And something started to shift — a stillness I had forgotten was available to me.

That’s when I looked down at my left arm. I’ve had a tattoo there for almost ten years. Three words: Be Here Now. It’s been there all this time as a guide for me, and yet I keep ignoring the words.

I can’t remember why I chose these particular words. Perhaps it was Ram Dass, or even other Eastern philosophical books I was reading at the time. Probably, as always, it was my subconscious leading the way.

That silence cracked something open. It showed me a distinction I hadn’t fully seen before: there is a profound difference between a thought and thinking.

A thought arrives on its own. It shows up unbidden — a flash, an instinct, a quiet knowing. It doesn’t announce itself. It just lands. These are the moments of real clarity: the idea that comes in the shower, the answer that surfaces mid-run, the sudden understanding that arrives when you’ve stopped looking for it. Thoughts like these have a lightness to them. They come from somewhere beneath the noise.

Thinking is what we do to those thoughts. We grab them. We interrogate them. We loop them, dissect them, stress-test them against every possible scenario. We use the prefrontal cortex — that overachieving, overworked part of the brain — to pull the thought apart until it no longer resembles what it was when it first arrived. We analyse it into a corner. We think ourselves into paralysis. And we call this being responsible. Strategic. Thorough.

Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, draws this line clearly. Thinking, he argues, is the source of our suffering — not the thoughts themselves, but what we do with them. The spiral. The second-guessing. The relentless inner commentary that turns a moment of clarity into a week of anxiety. He echoes a truth that philosophers and mystics have long understood: we cannot solve our problems with the same level of consciousness that created them. Tactics are temporary. An expansion of consciousness is permanent.

We are trying to think our way out of suffering that thinking created in the first place. That’s the trap. And most of us live inside it without ever noticing the walls.

I had been doing this with Lebanon. Taking a thought — I’m worried about the people I love — and turning it into hours of scrolling, catastrophizing, helpless rage. The thought was real and human and necessary. The thinking was destroying me.

This brings me to something Nguyen calls the inside-out understanding — the part of his work I keep returning to. The idea is simple, but it cuts deep: our experience of life is generated from the inside out, not the other way around.

Most of us live outside-in.

We believe our inner state is determined by what’s happening around us. The news is bad, so we feel bad. The business is struggling, so we feel anxious. The world is on fire, so we scroll at 6 a.m., looking for something to confirm what we already fear. We hand the keys to our inner life to everything outside of us — to circumstances, to other people, to algorithms designed to keep us agitated.

But the truth — and this is what the silence always reveals to me — is that it works the other way. The world doesn’t make us feel things. Our thinking about the world does. And if our thinking is the variable, then we have far more power over our experience than we’ve been told.

This isn’t toxic positivity. It’s not about pretending the war isn’t happening or that pain isn’t real. Pain is real. But suffering — the prolonged, compounding, self-inflicted kind — that is optional.

When I stopped scrolling and started sitting — really sitting, in the quiet, with my breath and my journal and a novel — I wasn’t escaping reality. I was returning to it. To my actual reality. The one that exists inside me, beneath the noise, beneath the headlines, beneath the thinking.

The practice I’m building now, morning by morning, is learning to receive a thought without immediately reacting to it. To let it land. To stay with it before I start pulling it apart.

Meditation is teaching me this. Not because it empties the mind — it doesn’t. If anything, sitting still reveals just how loud the mind actually is. But it creates a gap. A small, crucial space between the thought arriving and the thinking beginning. In that gap is something that feels like peace. Or at minimum, like presence.

I’m not there yet. I know this journey inwards, into silence and inner peace, will be a lifetime quest.

The overthinking mind is persistent. It wants to plan, to worry, to replay. But I’m starting to catch the moment — that precise transition from receiving a thought to reacting to it — and sometimes, I can pause there. Stay in it a little longer. Let the thought be what it is before I make it into something else.

The outside world will always have wars, headlines, and reasons to panic. It will always offer you a reason to leave yourself. The question is whether you take it.

Be here now. Not as a tattoo. As a practice.