A Childhood Memory That Taught Me About Presence

Sometimes the smallest moments in our past hold the deepest lessons for how to live today.

Key Takeaways

➡️ Presence often begins in ordinary moments. A childhood experience can awaken us to the simplicity of just being.

➡️ Children naturally embody presence before the mind complicates things. Returning to that state is part of adult healing.

➡️ Awareness transforms memory into wisdom. What once seemed insignificant can become a guide for living more fully.

It wasn’t a grand event. No achievement, no milestone, no defining “aha” moment. Just an afternoon in my childhood backyard—where the world slowed down enough for me to notice it.

We often think of our early memories as random fragments, but sometimes they resurface years later carrying a truth we weren’t ready to understand at the time. For me, it was a simple scene with sunlight, stillness, and the quiet company of a tree.

Only much later, reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, did I recognize what that memory really was: a glimpse into presence, long before I knew the word for it.

1. The Afternoon That Stopped Time

I must have been seven or eight. The house was noisy with the usual rhythm of family life, so I slipped out into the yard to escape the commotion. The air was heavy with summer heat, and I remember lying on the grass, staring up at the branches above me.

For reasons I couldn’t explain then, I felt completely still. My thoughts—usually darting around like dragonflies—went quiet. The leaves swayed gently, the light filtered through in shifting patterns, and for a few minutes, I wasn’t trying to be anywhere else. I wasn’t longing for what I didn’t have or worrying about what would happen tomorrow.

I was simply there.

That was it. No drama, no story. Just a child, the earth beneath me, and a moment so ordinary it almost disappeared—except it never did.

2. What I Understand Now

At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Childhood is full of fleeting moments. But as an adult, carrying the weight of deadlines, expectations, and an inner voice that rarely rests, that memory returns like a lifeline.

Eckhart Tolle describes presence as the state of awareness beyond thought—where the mind no longer drags you into the past or pushes you into the future. Reading his words, I realized I had touched that state before I even had language for it.

Children, in many ways, are natural teachers of presence. They lose themselves in play, in curiosity, in simply noticing what’s around them. The trouble is, as we grow, we trade that natural beingness for constant doing.

That backyard afternoon is a reminder that presence isn’t something new we must acquire—it’s something we already know, something we’ve lived before.

3. Carrying the Lesson Forward

Whenever I feel overwhelmed now, I think of that day on the grass. It reminds me that the peace I long for isn’t hidden in some future achievement or buried in a perfect past. It’s here, waiting, in the space between my breaths.

Sometimes I practice it by pausing mid-task, letting myself notice the play of light across a desk or the rhythm of my own heartbeat. Sometimes it’s as simple as stepping outside, looking at a tree, and letting it anchor me back into the now.

Tolle’s teaching reframed my memory: presence isn’t a rare mystical state—it’s the most natural thing in the world. The challenge isn’t finding it; it’s remembering to return to it, the way we might return to the simplicity of childhood.

Not every childhood memory becomes a defining story. But sometimes the quiet ones—the ones that seem almost forgettable—hold the deepest guidance.

That afternoon under the tree was my first teacher of presence, though I didn’t know it then.

Now, it’s a reminder that life’s most profound lessons often come not from doing more, but from remembering what it felt like to simply be.

And that, perhaps, is the real power of now.