I was going through the excellent book by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (which is one of my all time favorite books) and I came across an interesting passage about the amount of time and energy people spend on past and future events, instead of focusing on the present moment.

Everyone agrees, that the older you get, the quicker life seems to be. I remember a summer in between school years when I was 10 years old felt like forever, while now, I don’t even see the summers go by. Think back about your time between grades 2-7 for example. 6 years, it felt like such a long time. Now think of the past 6 years. Went by in a flash.

Why is that?

As adults, we spend too much time worrying about things that happened in our past and what could happen to us in the future. We are so conditioned to do this that we completely forget the most precious moment, and actually, the ONLY moment that there is…Now.

You see. as kids, we are not worried about what we are going to do a month from now, or what we will do the next year. Nor are we much worried about what we did a few years before. This is why life goes by slower for kids. They live in the moment.

I remember a day I probably was 8-9 years old. I was building a Lego castle, and it took me all day. It felt like such a long day. Because I was really into it, and I didn’t think about ending it or what I would do after. My attention was fully in the moment. This is a perfect example of “the journey is more important than the destination” type of thing.

Why do we worry so much about our past? To us, it’s our identity. If we forget it, we seemingly think that it is a loss of our identity. This is an illusion. The past should be just that…past. Take lessons out of it that can be useful to you NOW, but there is no point in dwelling on it, because for one, you can’t relive it, and two, you can’t change it. Accepting this is liberating, and a huge step into starting to live in the moment!

Now you can argue that it is important to think about the future. Well, think is not really a good choice of word. It is important to plan for the future. Thinking about it, means nothing. Why think about something that may or may not happen? While you are thinking about a potential moment, you are missing out on the only moment that matters, right now!

When you take into account that the majority of thoughts about past and future events are negative in connotations, are you not surprised why we live in a society full of despair and riddled with unhappy people? Why carry around a huge bag of heavy rocks, when you can just decide to drop it?

It’s a choice.

It’s that simple. There is no complex answer to most problems. It’s all as simple as it can be. Because it should be simple, we just forgot so along the way. Life situations get so complicated, that we think resolving them incurs complicated processes as well. That’s an illusion as well. Your life situation is whatever you THINK it is. You can flip this very moment and think of it in the opposite manner, and all of a sudden, your life situation is different. According to different points of views, you life situation is different from all points.

What matter is not your situation, what happened to you in the past, or what could potentially happen to you in the future. What matters is Now. Life is now. Life happens at this very moment. Embrace it. Make the most of it. Now is the only moment that there is. If you don’t live Now, when do you ever live? Do you want to reach a point where you ask yourself, “where did my life go?” Your life didn’t go anywhere, it was right here, right now! You just weren’t “present” for it.

Once you wrap your head around this, and start living in the moment, you will start appreciating life in a much deeper level. No longer are you controlled by what happened before, or waiting for something to happen in the future. You are making things happen in sync with life…which is in the present moment. There is no better way to experience life than truly living in the moment. Ask yourself, if not now, then when?

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