‘Being in the Moment’ Just Sounds Pretty Wanky to Me

I’ll admit it, ‘Being in the Moment’ sounds pretty wanky to me. I teach actors to act in the moment, yet every time I say that, my little bullshit detector goes off and says ‘Mark, you sound like a Well-Meaning Hippy Twat or some Zen Master’. Okay, so I don’t like the phrase either BUT, I do think that ‘the moment’ is where the actor does their best work, so it helps if you understand it.

This is my attempt to talk about ‘being in the moment’ in a sensible, pragmatic way. If your acting teacher says that you need to be in the moment, I think you’re probably right to say ‘I am in the fucking moment you idiot’. The trouble is, that I suppose being in the moment is quite difficult. We feel much more comfortable thinking about the future or recalling the past. Actually being in the moment is hard. Acting in the moment is tricky because it requires a certain bravery, to place yourself at the risk of failure because ‘the moment’ is filled with danger and requires a courageous actor.

I suppose ‘being in the moment’ means being present. Not present, like physically attending, but a developed sense of the self and others in the exact and precise here and now. When you’re an actor, it’s very difficult to ‘be in the moment’ because the future has so much meaning. The future movement you need to make, the future objective to be achieved, the future line you have to deliver. And then you have to deal with the past, the line that just got fucked up, the snag you made on your coat at the door on the way on to the stage, the way your fellow actor looked at you after that last scene. It’s hard to compete with these things. But the moment is our target zone. When you’re in the moment, you’re in your element, you’re in the zone, you’re in flow.

We know that our physical corporeal self (the body) never leaves the here and now. The body is always present. But it is the mind, the focus or the concentration that seems to time travel around a lot.   Breathing is key and core.  Breathing keeps us in control, it allows us to centre ourselves in the moment. When shit goes down, it’s our breathing that shows us our true reaction, we can’t hide it. The body cannot lie and the breath won’t hide your emotional response, even if your mouth is closed and you keep a straight face. We are our breath.

Being in the moment is taking each thing as it comes, dealing with what’s in front of you now, not in the future. Now. Worrying about the future is after all as effective as trying to mend a puncture with an elephant.