“While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes.”

In the 1600s, there was a man in Paris who spent his days breaking pots, mending sandals, and scrubbing greasy cauldrons in a monastery kitchen. He was uneducated, clumsy, and held the lowliest rank possible.

What it means to be a missionary to the present moment

And yet, from across France, people traveled from far and wide to see him.

They didn’t come for a miraculous touch or a theological lecture. They came because he was the happiest man in France, and they wanted to know why.

He was a monk and his name was Lawrence.

His secret? Every day and in every moment, Lawrence determined to merely be where he was.

He famously claimed that he was as close to God while flipping an omelet as he was when kneeling at the altar.

Three centuries later, Happiness guru Arthur Brooks is saying something remarkably similar.

In his book From Strength to Strength, Brooks writes that satisfaction comes “not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.” He points to a simple, piercing line from the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh: “While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes.”

I know. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple. Like the kind of thing someone says when they have either become very wise or have run out of things to say.

But try it.

Stand at the sink with your hands in warm water and notice how quickly your mind leaves the room. Your body is in the kitchen, but your mind is rehearsing tomorrow, regretting yesterday, or answering an imaginary email.

The dishes get washed, but the moment goes unlived.

Honestly, this is the life I have lived. Doing one thing; being somewhere else. I wonder: How much of my life have I actually been present for?

This question carries a different weight in the “fourth quarter” of life. When there is more life behind us than in front of us, we begin to understand that a life is not made of milestones or trophies. It is a series of moments.

Ordinary ones. Repeated ones. Unnoticed ones.

The cup of coffee before the house wakes up.

The walk to the mailbox with a grandchild.

The face across the table.

The light through the window.

The work no one applauds.

The temptation is to think these moments are filler between the “important” parts. But what if they are the important parts?

This paying attention to the moment we are in is what Brooks calls: “savoring”—the deliberate act of paying attention to what you are doing while you are doing it, and inwardly saying, I want to fully be here for this. It is the choice to “save the present” because it is all your past will ever be.

“savoring”—the deliberate act of paying attention to what you are doing while you are doing it, and inwardly saying, I want to fully be here for this.

Brother Lawrence never left Paris. He never crossed an ocean or planted a flag in new territory. His entire “mission field” was a monastery kitchen roughly the size of a modern office cubicle.

And yet he became one of the most widely traveled souls in history.

Not because he went somewhere. Because he arrived somewhere. Every single day.

Only a few times in my life have I ever met one of these people. They are rare, but recognizable. They walk into an ordinary room and are actually “there.”

Not distracted; Not performing; Not mentally somewhere else.

They are what I am calling a Designated Observer: someone who arrives in a moment believing fully that a power bigger than themselves has deposited them there for a reason. They have decided, quietly and without announcement, that this moment is worth their full attention.

If you have ever met one of these persons, you will never forget them.

You may have met this person. Maybe at a job or dinner table. Or even while you wait for your tire to be repaired.

They make you feel, somehow, that you are the most interesting thing in the room — not because they flatter you, but because they are genuinely present with you. They have crossed a border that most of us never cross.

That border is the thin, stubborn line between being somewhere and arriving there.

The monastery kitchen was Brother Lawrence’s uncharted territory. He treated every pot, every flame, every mundane task as a frontier he had never visited before — because he hadn’t.

Not this pot at this moment in time.

Your office cubicle can be the same frontier.

So can the hospital waiting room, school pickup line, or difficult phone call.

These are not interruptions to a meaningful life. They are the uncharted territory of your one specific, unrepeatable day — and you have been sent there, not to endure it, but, as a missionary, to discover what is hidden inside it.

The question is simply whether you will arrive.

A thoughtful person may call this mindfulness. A person of faith may call it communion. Perhaps both are reaching for the same mystery: that the present moment is not empty. It is crowded with possibility.

To become a “missionary to the present moment” is to cross the border between distraction and attention.

It is to stop treating now as the thing to get through on the way to later.

It is to believe that something sacred is hidden in the very thing we are tempted to rush past.

And so the sink becomes a small altar. The dish in your hand becomes a summons. The warm water becomes a mercy. And for once, you are not elsewhere.

You are here.