The key to staying centered in the present is developing some discipline in how you use your attention. That’s what meditation does.
Your attention can either be engaged with the experience that’s unfolding at this moment or it can be engaged with the channel of your mind that creates and maintains the story of your life. That storytelling channel takes your past experiences and weaves them into a personal history. It also plays around with various scenarios about the future. Your attention can’t really be both in the moment and in the storytelling channel; it can switch back and forth between them, but then it does neither of them justice.
Unless you train your attention otherwise, it does a whole lot of switching back and forth, often only occasionally checking in with what’s actually going on in the moment so you don’t run into trouble. The problem with this is that what’s going on now is your actual life. The stuff in the storytelling channel is just a story. It’s very easy to get so caught up in the story that you confuse it with your actual life. The story begins to feel like the important thing, and so it’s where your attention gravitates by default.
Most forms of meditation involve resting the attention on some aspect of your present experience and following it carefully as it unfolds. Often the breath is used as this home base for the attention. So you engage as much of your attention as you can in the ins and outs of your breath, investigating it and tuning into its nuances, all without manipulating the breath. Just see how it is.
You’ll find that while you’re doing this, the storytelling channel continues its work in the background. You’re aware that there’s this narrative activity going on somewhere. But—and this is crucial—that’s not a problem. It’s not a problem because you have the ability to keep your attention from tuning into that channel and listening to its feed. You can, with practice, stay resolutely rooted in the breath channel instead. The more of your attentive resources you can pour into the breath, the more the storytelling recedes into the background.
Fair warning: this takes a great deal of determination and practice. You will find this difficult, frustrating and boring. You will rebel against this on some level. As appealing as the idea of having a steady, centered attention is, getting there is a whole lot of work. If you can do this with your breath, you can do this with all the other aspects of your life as well.