Welcome to 2026! “New year, new you?” 

We place a lot of emphasis in our society on new words – the Oxford English Dictionary and Cambridge Dictionary go neck-a-neck annually in a bookish virtual boat race with their words of the year: Cambridge’s was ‘parasocial’; the OED’s ‘rage bait’. And there’s always some buzz about words and phrases used of late by young people that older people don’t understand. Then there are occasional outliers like “Bam” (“Bélem Action Mechanism”), an acronym whose popularity at Cop30 made the news.

But what about old words and phrases? Old words with gnarled roots twisting through our communal mutual understanding. They can be tricky. 

Everyone tends to assume that their understanding of a word is what other people mean and understand by it. And this can lead to ‘disagreements’ that are actually (louder and louder, more and more frustrated) misunderstandings.

This semantic fluidity is also one way a talented debater can turn an opponent in knots

And so we come to the old word I’d like to discuss – old phrase, actually – ‘being present’.

What does it actually mean to ‘be present’? Take these three scenarios:

-You’re walking in town, practising calming breath. To soothe your nervous system, your out breath is two beats longer than your in breath. Suddenly, someone steps in your way, and in an instant your ‘being present’ collapses like a hedgehog into a prickly ball.

-A colleague comes to talk to you at your desk. An email draft is flowing from your fingertips, but you remind yourself to be present, so you swivel your chair to face your colleague. You look her in the eye. You’re present. You hear her outlining why she has come to chat to you: prep for tomorrow’s meeting… But you realise you’re thinking about dinner. Do you have time to nip to the supermarket on the way home…?

-You’re on a train. It’s an especially beautiful day and you’re passing through scenic countryside. You tell yourself to put your work and your phone down, and just soak up the views. You gaze out the window and, in your head, you repeat over and over ‘I am present, I am present’. Yet when the announcement about the next station sounds, you realise you could barely describe a single detail of the landscape you’ve just passed through.

Yes, being present is really, really difficult – and it’s getting more difficult.

Now, I do believe that there are people who are close to being fully present at all times. But those people are highly evolved practitioners. They have committed their lives to achieving just that. I was once fortunate enough to attend a talk by the Dalai Lama and the sense of… tranquility around him was quite something. It was like standing before a mill pond on a bright winter’s day.

We can’t all be Dalai Lama levels of ‘present, but we can train ourselves in this priceless skill, and I know of no better tool for doing that than mindfulness, itself a distillation of the Buddhism practised by the Dalai Lama.

But my offering today is this – I think we should bring some fire to this quest, to regard being present as a radical act of rebellion. 

Why? Because more and more, the world nudges (shoves!) us away from the present. Social media seeks to devour our attention. AI dazzles us into accepting imperfect solutions. Intense periods of work frazzle our internal worlds.

We must resist by training, cherishing and fiercely guarding our capacity to be present.

Let’s also remind ourselves that ‘being present’ is really ‘coming back to the present’. It’s about committing to the resistance I’m invoking, and practising it again and again and again.

Picture a celeb moving through a crowd, their bodyguard’s imposing frame protecting them from any unwanted attention. Be your own present’s bodyguard, shielding yourself from all the elements pressing in on you – because the more expansive you can make your now, the better the version of yourself you present to the world. A thousand different responses can be available to you in the vastness of every single moment – don’t just accept one, like the hedgehog curling into a ball.

P.S. I came across this quote online and really resonated with it. I hope you do, too:

Strong leadership in the new year isn’t about doing more, it’s about leading with more intention, empathy, and belief in what’s possible.