Living in the Present Is a Creative Act
On presence, attention, and what About Time still gets right
I saw About Time last weekend while I was in Connecticut with my family. Some of them were watching it for the first time. It’s a film I’ve returned to again and again, but this viewing felt especially timely.
Around the same time, Rachel McAdams received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Domhnall Gleeson, her co-star in About Time, spoke about her not just as a gifted actor, but as someone whose presence makes everything around her better. It echoed the very thing this film quietly argued:
What endures is not optimization or reinvention, but attention.
On the surface, About Time is built around a familiar device. A young man discovers he can revisit moments in his past and change them. But like many good stories, the premise is a decoy. This is not a film about fixing mistakes or rewriting history. It’s a film about learning how to inhabit the present.
The most powerful stories are rarely about control. They’re about presence.
The Story We’re Taught to Tell Ourselves
Many of us live inside an inherited narrative that tells us creativity will return later.
After the right choice.
After the wrong one is fixed.
After life becomes more manageable.
This story keeps us waiting. It encourages us to see our current lives as provisional, something to endure rather than inhabit. Creativity, in this framing, becomes a reward for improvement instead of something that emerges from attention.
You can see the effects everywhere: Writers holding drafts hostage until they feel ready; artists waiting for clarity before they begin; women postponing beauty, rest, or leisure because those things feel irresponsible when life is busy.
In these moments, it’s not that creativity has disappeared. It’s that we’ve stepped outside our own lives, watching them from a distance, convinced we’ll enter fully later.
What About Time Actually Teaches
What About Time understands is that this way of living doesn’t work. In the film, (spoiler alert), time travel eventually becomes unnecessary. Once the main character learns how to fully inhabit a day, the impulse to redo it fades.
The heart of the story isn’t the romance, but the relationship between father and son. Love shows up through repetition. Shared meals. Long walks. Familiar jokes. Even grief is held through presence rather than correction.
One of the film’s most radical ideas is also its simplest: live the same day twice. Not to fix it. Not to improve it. But to notice it.
This runs counter to how we’re taught to move through the world. We’re encouraged to treat our days as raw material to be optimized. But the film suggests something quieter and, in many ways, more demanding. Those ordinary days, when lived with attention, are already enough.
What lingered for me as Gleeson spoke was not the shape of her career, but the care he described. Careers endure. Presence is what people remember.
The story doesn’t ask us to fix our lives.
It asks us to notice them.
When Change Is Dramatic and When It Isn’t
This isn’t an argument against change. Sometimes, creative rebirth is dramatic.
Sometimes it does require a move, a rupture, a decisive leaving behind, because there are moments when starting over is necessary and brave. But those moments are not the whole story. I wrote about this last week in “Begin Again (Without Burning It All Down),” and I’m still thinking about it.
More often, creativity returns not through reinvention, but through attention. Through staying. Through learning how to inhabit the life you already have, instead of constantly preparing for the next one.
Living in the present doesn’t mean settling. It means recognizing when transformation comes from arrival rather than escape.
Reframing the Ordinary as Creative Material
Creativity doesn’t always ask for a new life. Often, it asks for a new way of seeing the one you’re already living.
A walk becomes a scene.
A meal becomes a moment.
A conversation becomes dialogue.
When life is treated as disposable, something to rush through on the way to something better, creativity dries up. There’s nothing to work with. But when life is treated as meaningful in itself, imagination begins to stir.
The story doesn’t begin when life gets interesting. It begins with attention.
This is why so many creative people feel stalled without quite knowing why. It isn’t always a lack of discipline or desire. It’s a loss of contact with meaning. Days blur together not because nothing is happening, but because nothing is being noticed.
You don’t need to narrate your life from a distance, as if it’s something you’ll revise later. You need to arrive where you already are.
Drafts don’t come from fixing yourself. They come from living inside your days with enough attention that language sharpens, images form, and meaning emerges. The present moment isn’t a limitation on creativity. It’s the threshold.
A Gentle Invitation
What would it look like to live today as if you weren’t planning to revise it later?
What scene are you already in, but avoiding?
What ordinary moment might be asking for your attention?
You don’t need to rewrite your life.
You just need to step fully into the story you’re already living.
If this way of seeing resonates, you’re in the right place. Live In Story is where I explore storytelling, presence, and the creative life week by week. You’re always welcome to stay awhile.
One of my very favorite movies!