Recently, while visiting Belize a group of us went out to one of the cayes. We did some snorkeling, saw some incredible fish, and spent the afternoon on the beach with cold beers and BBQ. I was trying to be present in the moment. I don’t believe I pulled out my phone the whole day.

But here’s the thing, after this enjoyable day, I couldn’t easily describe it to someone. Not in any way that would help someone understand what it was actually like to be there. I can give you the itinerary, boat ride, snorkeling, beach, beers, but that’s a skeleton. There’s no flesh on it. No color of the water, no weight of the heat, no detail that would make you feel like you were there. The experience passed through me and left almost nothing I can return to.

That’s not a phone problem. I didn’t have my phone out. It’s something else.

There’s no shortage of writing about the damage of smartphones and endless scrolling. What gets less attention is what you discover after you put the phone away.

I deleted the apps, blocked the news sites, stopped reaching for the phone when things got quiet. And I thought that was the work.

But that wasn’t enough.

I’ve known for a long time that I wasn’t a sensitive person, though I didn’t always have words to describe it. My mother used to tell a story about taking me to an amusement park when I was five or six. We rented one of those paddle boats on a lake inside the park. While we were out on the water, she asked if I was actually enjoying myself. Of course I was, and I meant it. But I gave no visible indication that I was enjoying the day. She said she could never figure out when I was actually enjoying activities.

I wasn’t trying to hide my feelings. That was just my natural state. Experiences arrived quietly, without fanfare, without the emotional signal that says pay attention, remember this. It’s been that way my whole life.

I only tell that story because it is related to what I’m trying to figure out. The Belize boat trip wasn’t a failure of presence. It was a failure of something harder to solve. The ability to hold what you notice before it disappears.

I recently started reading Ted Simon’s book Jupiter’s Travels while researching the places I’d be riding through in Central and South America. Ted set out in 1973 on a Triumph Tiger 100 and spent four years riding through 45 countries and over 126k kilometers. The scale of his travels is staggering. But what stopped me wasn’t the scale of the journey. It was the quality of his attention.

There’s a passage where Ted is somewhere in Africa, frustrated by a delay, focused on getting to Cape Town in time to catch a boat. He writes: “At the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem solved quickly and to get on my way… What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realised that the interruptions were the journey.”

That line landed hard. Not only because it’s a clever observation about travel. Because it named something I recognized in myself, the destination mindset. The idea that the experience is the thing you planned, and everything else is noise to move through. Ted eventually learned to see the interruptions differently. He didn’t just notice more of his surroundings. He held what he noticed. His writing is the evidence of that.

Reading him, I realized I don’t have the awareness or the practice to really notice. It’s a two-stage problem.

Stage one is the phone. The distraction, the escape hatch, the reflex to reach for something else when the present moment gets quiet or uncomfortable. Most of the writing about attention stops here. Put the phone down. Be present. Done.

But stage one is just clearing the ground. It’s necessary, and I’m not dismissing it. I spent real effort getting to this point. But it’s the prerequisite, not the destination.

Stage two is harder and quieter. It’s the practice of noticing and holding experience, catching the texture of a moment before it passes, retaining something you can actually return to. I don’t have that practice. I was on a boat in Belize, present by my own account, and I came back with nothing I could describe. Not because I was distracted. Because I’ve never learned to hold what I see.

So what now?

I know writing and photography are part of it. You can’t describe something you didn’t notice. But I suspect there’s a step before that. Something more basic. Like learning to pause within an experience instead of just moving through it. The exact process is foreign to me.

Ted Simon’s example is completely aspirational for me. I have no illusions I’ll write like him. But I hope that I can develop the ability to move through the world like he did. Not waiting for experience to announce itself, but going out to meet it. I’ve never tried. My default mode has always been to let experience pass through quietly. For most of my life, that was fine.

I put the phone down and removed the distractions. But the next level, the ability to notice and actually hold my experience in the moment, still isn’t there yet.

The work continues.