The radical move here isn't the familiar advice to "be present"—it's Ray's suggestion that anxiety and the present moment are incompatible states, not merely that we should prefer one. When you're truly attending to your breath, you've physically removed yourself from the mental machinery that manufactures worry, which almost always concerns futures that haven't arrived. A person sitting in traffic, genuinely feeling each inhalation rather than rehearsing an argument they might have later, discovers that the anxiety wasn't about the traffic itself. Ray understands what many wellness platitudes miss: the present isn't just nicer to visit—it's the only place where fear actually loses its foothold.