ACT, Part Six: Be Where Your Feet Are
Updated: Sep 22
Mindfulness, Attention and the Only Life Actually Happening
I have occasionally driven several miles and suddenly realized I remember almost nothing about getting there. Apparently I stopped at the lights, stayed in my lane, made the appropriate turns, and avoided inconveniencing anyone else on the road. Some reasonably competent part of me was driving the car.
I just wasn't particularly there for it.
We do something similar with larger portions of our lives. We sit at dinner thinking about work, listen to someone while preparing what we'll say when they finally stop talking, lie in bed replaying something that happened three days ago, or worry about next Thursday so effectively that Thursday manages to ruin tonight.
Our bodies are remarkably obedient about remaining where we put them.
Our minds have other plans.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy calls one of its six core processes contact with the present moment. The language is clinical; the idea isn't. It means being sufficiently present to notice what is happening inside and around us while it's actually happening.
Parts Four and Five were about direction and movement. Values gave us a compass, and committed action asked us to move our feet in the direction we'd chosen.
But there's another requirement.
We have to be where our feet are.
We Have Always Been Distracted
It would be convenient to blame our problems with attention entirely on phones.
Phones deserve some blame. We've created astonishing little machines capable of transporting our attention almost anywhere on earth while our bodies remain sitting at the dinner table.
But distraction is considerably older than technology. Children stared out school windows before screens existed. Adults mentally wandered away during sermons, husbands and wives failed to hear each other, and people worried about tomorrow and regretted yesterday long before anyone had Wi-Fi.
Technology didn't invent distraction.
It industrialized it.
There was once more empty space in a day. Standing in line meant standing in line. Waiting for someone involved waiting. A lull in a conversation was simply a lull rather than an apparent emergency requiring immediate inspection of a small glowing rectangle.
Boredom occasionally forced us to look around.
Now we can leave without going anywhere.
Missing Something While Trying to Keep It
Concerts provide a strange modern example. A musician you've wanted to see for years walks onto the stage, the first song begins, and hundreds of people immediately raise their phones. There's something almost touching about the impulse:
I want to keep this.
So we record it. In doing so, we preserve a smaller version of the experience while partially removing ourselves from the larger one occurring directly in front of us.
We do it with grandchildren, vacations, sunsets, birthday parties, meals, dogs doing something ridiculous, and people we love. The first impulse shifts almost imperceptibly from Look at that to I need to capture that.
I take pictures too. Some moments deserve photographs, and memory appreciates the assistance.
But there's a peculiar line where preserving an experience begins competing with having it.
Sometimes take the picture.
And sometimes leave the camera down and let the moment disappear.
Moments do that.
It's part of what makes them moments.
The Mind Is a Time Traveler
Phones aren't even our most effective means of leaving the present. The human mind requires no charger. Regret travels backward. Anxiety travels forward. Resentment can keep us living inside a conversation everyone else finished years ago.
None of those abilities is inherently a problem. Memory is one of the great gifts of being human. Without it we couldn't learn from experience, understand our own stories, or carry people we love with us after they're gone.
Imagination is equally necessary. We anticipate, plan, dream, create, prepare, and imagine lives that don't exist yet so we can begin building them.
The problem isn't visiting yesterday or tomorrow.
It's forgetting where we live.
I think of the past as a remarkable library. There are rooms worth returning to, stories that need rereading, things we misunderstood the first time, and pages we may spend much of our lives trying to understand.
The future is more like a planning room. We spread out maps, consider possibilities, anticipate weather, decide what to pack, and choose where we hope to go.
Both rooms are useful.
Neither is home.
Worry Charges Us in Advance
Anxiety is particularly talented at stealing the present on behalf of the future.
What if the test result is bad? What if my child makes a terrible decision? What if the conversation goes badly? What if I lose my job?
The mind tells us it's preparing, and sometimes it is. Useful planning eventually produces something: If this happens, here's what I can do.
Worry is different.
Worry walks the same hallway repeatedly, opening the same doors and discovering the same rooms. No new information appears, no decision gets made, and eventually we're simply experiencing tomorrow's possible pain today.
This creates one of anxiety's less generous bargains.
If the feared event never happens, we may have surrendered hours, days, or months to something that existed only as a possibility. If it does happen, all that worrying rarely exempts us from feeling it when it arrives.
We paid in advance and still received the bill.
There comes a point when the future needs to give today back.
Yesterday Can Take Today Too
Regret has its own version of time travel. I should have known. Why did I say that? Why didn't I leave? Why did I leave? If only I had…
Some of those questions deserve attention. Sometimes we need to understand what happened, learn from mistakes, grieve losses, make restitution where possible, or recognize a pattern we don't intend to repeat.
But reflection can gradually turn into residence.
Then we find ourselves living in a world where the one thing we most desperately need is the one thing reality cannot provide:
A different yesterday.
The past can be understood. Some of it can be repaired. It can be forgiven, mourned, reconsidered, and carried differently.
It cannot be rerun. Sooner or later, whatever we learn there has to come back with us.
Otherwise yesterday gets today too.
Autopilot Isn't the Enemy
We couldn't function without automatic behavior. Imagine consciously planning every movement involved in brushing your teeth or relearning how to tie your shoes every morning.
The difficulty comes when the wrong things become automatic.
Someone criticizes me and I'm defending before I've completely heard the criticism. Anxiety appears and avoidance begins organizing itself. Shame arrives and I hide. Boredom appears and my hand somehow discovers my phone without consulting the rest of me.
A spouse says something in a particular tone, and before we've really heard the sentence, we're already halfway into the argument we apparently always have.
These sequences can become astonishingly fast.
This is where present-moment awareness becomes considerably more than a relaxation technique. Attention creates a tiny interruption in the machinery.
I'm getting defensive. My chest just tightened. I want to leave. There's that thought again. I haven't actually heard the last three sentences.
Nothing has been solved.
But I've arrived.
And once I'm here, choices become possible.
You Can't Choose in a Moment You Miss
This is where Part Six connects with everything we've been doing. I can't step back from a thought I haven't noticed. I can't make room for a feeling I don't realize I'm fighting. I can't follow the compass if I've forgotten what matters, and I can't take committed action in a moment I've mentally left.
I certainly can't recognize a Choice Point after I've blown through the intersection on autopilot.
Suppose someone I love says something that irritates me. If I'm present enough, I may notice several things almost simultaneously: anger has arrived, my mind is saying Here we go again, I want to interrupt, and I have a sarcastic response available that is, unfortunately, quite good.
I may also remember that I love this person.
Now there's some room.
I may still choose the sarcasm. Psychological flexibility doesn't guarantee wisdom.
But attention gives wisdom a fighting chance.
The Choice Point from Part Five exists only here. The compass may tell me north, but I can change direction only from the patch of ground I'm actually standing on.
Where Did You Go?
That's a simple question I like when I notice that I've disappeared: Where did I go?
Sometimes I've gone backward. I'm replaying an injury, humiliation, mistake, loss, or argument and mentally trying to change something that has already happened.
Sometimes I've gone forward. I'm rehearsing catastrophe or demanding certainty from a future that has declined to provide it.
And sometimes I've simply gone somewhere easier.
That last one matters because the present isn't always particularly pleasant. The conversation is difficult, the meeting is boring, the child wants attention when we're tired, or someone we love is telling us something we've already heard.
The person sitting across the table also has a competitive disadvantage. They're up against an entire internet populated by people who've become extraordinarily good at keeping us looking at it.
Being present costs something.
Absence does too.
There's a difference between spending an evening with someone and merely occupying the same room.
Mindfulness Is Less Exotic Than We Make It
The word mindfulness has accumulated unnecessary luggage. People hear it and imagine meditation cushions, incense, retreats, unusual breathing, and perhaps some mysterious ability to make the mind completely blank.
A blank mind isn't the goal. Mindfulness is considerably more ordinary.
Notice what's happening while it's happening. Walk and occasionally feel your feet hitting the ground. Eat something and actually taste it. Listen to music without simultaneously doing three other things. Stand beside a river long enough to notice the current before turning the river into a photograph.
Listen to someone without preparing your answer.
Your attention will wander because that's what attention does. The practice isn't keeping it chained to the present. The practice is noticing where it went and bringing it back.
Leave.
Notice.
Return.
Then do it again.
The Body Knows What Time It Is
One of the simplest ways to return is through the body. My mind can be in 1997.
My feet cannot. My mind can attend a meeting next month, replay a conversation from years ago, imagine next Christmas, or construct a fairly elaborate catastrophe scheduled for some undetermined future date. Meanwhile my hands remain here.
Look around. Notice light against a wall, movement outside the window, the grain of a table. Listen long enough to distinguish traffic from wind, someone moving in another room, or a bird that had been singing before you bothered to hear it.
Feel your feet against the floor, the chair beneath you, the temperature of the air.
None of this is particularly mystical.
You're simply giving your attention evidence about where your life is currently occurring.
Attention Is Something We Give
There is another reason presence matters that goes beyond our own psychological flexibility.
Attention is relational. Think about talking with someone who is genuinely listening—not waiting for their turn, fixing, glancing at a phone, or mentally searching for a similar story about themselves.
They're simply there.
There is something almost startling about receiving another person's undivided attention now because it has become increasingly rare.
Attention says, For these few minutes, you matter more than wherever else I could be.
After more than forty years of marriage, I don't think love consists mainly of dramatic moments. Much of it is attention accumulated over time: looking up, listening again, noticing a change in tone, remaining in the room when some part of us has already wandered elsewhere.
Children know this.
Dogs certainly know it.
Spouses eventually notice its absence.
Presence isn't merely a mindfulness skill. It's one of the ways we love.
The Ordinary Things We Don't Know Are Precious Yet
One of the peculiar things about getting older is discovering how many things became precious only after they disappeared. A house you once wanted to leave. Children making noise upstairs. A dog waiting at the door. Your parents' voices. Dinner around a table when everybody still lived close enough to be there.
The ordinary routines of a marriage before time began moving faster than it once seemed to.
At the time, none of these things announced themselves as important.
They were simply life.
That's another reason presence matters. Not because every moment is profound. Most aren't. Some afternoons are boring. Some meals are forgettable. Sometimes the present moment contains a headache, bad weather, somebody in a foul mood, and laundry that has apparently begun reproducing.
But occasionally the thing we're barely noticing today becomes something we would give almost anything to experience once more.
The trouble is, we don't get to know which moments those will be.
What to Carry Forward
Part Six adds three things to the flexibility we've been building. The mind can travel through time, but life occurs in the present. Attention isn't something we permanently achieve; it's something we repeatedly leave and return to. And awareness creates the moment in which all the other ACT processes become possible.
Part Four gave us the compass.
Part Five put boots on the trail.
Part Six asks us to be where our feet are.
ACT doesn't ask us to abandon yesterday or tomorrow. Come back from yesterday carrying whatever it taught you. Come back from tomorrow after you've done whatever planning tomorrow requires. Come back from the screen, the imaginary argument, the rehearsal, the regret, and whatever story your mind wandered off to finish.
Come back into the room.
This is where I can notice what my mind is telling me, make room for what I feel, remember what matters, recognize the Choice Point, and take the next step north.
More importantly, this is where the people I love actually are.
The present has plenty of disadvantages. It can be inconvenient, uncomfortable, boring, frightening, painful, and considerably less cooperative than the life we construct in our heads.
But it possesses one quality yesterday and tomorrow can never offer.
This one is actually happening.
And that leaves one final ACT question. We've learned to come back to the person standing here.
Part Seven asks: Who exactly is that person?
© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.
Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.
Comments