In certain religious ways of seeing the world, it can be easy to mistake presence for transcendence. We struggle to fully embody our own experiences in the ‘here and now’ when everything is made to be ‘the somewhere else and the not yet.’ It turns out that being fully intimate with our own experience can be difficult when we have to filter everything through an “eternal” worldview. When that’s you, you end up holding each moment at arm’s length. And a lack of full presence doesn’t just diminish our experience of the world, but our engagement in the world.