Presence does not arrive with birth, nor does it depart with death. It does not wait for time to pass or moments to accumulate. Presence is already here; before thought names it, before memory reaches backward, before imagination leans forward. Whatever appears does so within presence, not alongside it.
The past feels real only because it is remembered now. The future feels compelling only because it is anticipated now. Thought moves, images shift, emotions rise and fall, yet each movement occurs against the same unmoving fact: presence has never left. Even the idea of being elsewhere is something that appears here.
Bodies change. Identities dissolve and reform. Worlds expand and collapse. Physics tells us that matter and energy do not vanish; they transform. Even more striking, what we call matter accounts for only a fraction of what exists. The vast remainder: dark energy, dark matter, remains unseen, unnamed, yet undeniably present. Absence itself never escapes presence. Non-existence, if such a thing could be said to occur, would still be known as present.
Death, then, does not challenge presence. It only challenges continuity of form. If awareness continues, presence continues. If awareness ceases, the cessation itself is not outside presence. Nothing steps beyond it. Nothing escapes it. There is no edge where presence stops and something else begins.
Impermanence governs every form. Thoughts change. Bodies age. Stars burn out. Universes may even end. Yet impermanence depends on something that does not change. Change can only be noticed because presence remains steady enough to register it. Movement requires a stillness that is never lost.
Presence does not belong to you, yet nothing is more intimate. It is not located inside or outside. Those distinctions arise within it. Every attempt to grasp presence turns it into an object and misses it. Presence cannot be held because it is what is holding everything else.
Even the end of everything would not be an end of presence. It would simply be presence without form. No time. No matter. No universe. Still present.
Nothing needs to be added to this. Nothing needs to be resolved. Presence is not a conclusion; it is the condition that allows conclusions to appear and disappear.
And it has never not been here.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 