It is such a shame that the idea of living in the moment has been flogged to death. It’s past the point of cliché. It’s such a shame because it’s also something that is of such importance. Recently I have been attempting to practice this and have had far more actual and empirically measurable success than ever before. It seems strange to suggest it is something measurable because it is something you experience without a computer scanning your brain waves. You feel it though and it is measurable because your conscious mind can compare it to previous memories of experience.
Recently I have been able to bring my head out of the clouds. The clouds were anxious one revolving around the stresses of a man soon to turn thirty-five and with little to show for it in a conventional sense. What we must always remember is that we are not alone in this world and undoubtedly somewhere someone is feeling very similar emotions to us in this moment. We are never alone in our worries, people have been there before and others will be there in the future. But the actualities are not important, the point is that we lose ourselves in our mind and struggle to exist in the moment. While I am thinking about the enormity of the future and the size of the task of achievement ahead of me I am not experiencing anything that life gives me while I am sitting on this boat, or spending time with friends or family, or walking up the mountain, or whatever it is.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have just spent the last half an hour coming up with a pretty spectacular plan for this time next year involving hitchhiking through Patagonia, and sailing to Antarctica or the Chilean fjords on the west, or both. This escapism into fantasy may be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than embracing the anxiety of sorting ones life out but it is equally as pointless. Of course we have to come up with plans to make anything happen but it’s important not to spend more time in them than is absolutely necessary. The moment this happens it is nothing more than escapism.
What of the success I mentioned earlier then. It’s not ground breaking. Somehow you need to find a way to step back, to centre yourself. It is as if you step out of your mind for a second, observing yourself. See your surroundings and understand you’re not in that future, you’re not taking on the entire task of fixing life there and then, or you’re not sailing fjords. Step back and see what your eyes see, what your ears can hear, nose can smell. You just come back into yourself for a second and in the process break the chain, the flow the mind was rambling on in in it’s old habit. Then you realise all you have is today, and think what you can do in this moment, today, how to achieve whatever it is the mind has been intoxicated with all this time. You can’t do anything more than you can do now, you take it one step, one day at a time. That is all, that is all you can do. Nothing else is important, but when the time comes for it to be so you’ll deal with it then, one step, one day at a time. Even then we still procrastinate, it doesn’t stop us being lazy, we continue to put things off but at least we only have to deal with little things as they come. In time who knows, that’s the future, it’s conjecture, it’s still nothing more than a fantasy. It’s not now, it’s not real.
Observations and Misunderstandings 