Traveling back to the present...

I have been staring at a blank screen for the past hour. Starting posts and then holding down the delete button as they disappear. Once one starts, I stop to think what it will look like in the end, ultimately decide it's stupid, and press delete. It brought to mind the image of a chess game. You know, you have to be like 20 moves in the future in your head before you make your current move. And, here I sit, playing chess, trying to determine how this post will end before it's even begun.

It's a habit of mine, a tough one to break. When I was younger, in high school and college, like many people that age I would guess, I was always focused on the future. I couldn't wait to grow up, get married, have kids. Yet there I was in college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The rest of my life. It's this common ideal that is truly a farce- a fuzzy picture that doesn't even really exist. Yet my world revolved around it. I couldn't be happy where I was because I was never there. I was hanging out at "the rest of my life".

Yet, in the past few years, I've overcome that. I like the fact that life can change in an instant. It's exciting. I don't deign to believe that what I am doing now or who I am being right now will exist in "the rest of my life". Nor do I pretend that I can predict what will. But as I stared at this blank screen, worrying about the valuable sleep I am losing, it became clear that now I am living in "the next five minutes". I may not worry anymore about when and if I will have kids, whether I will be in the same jobs next year, how I will look when I'm forty. Now I focus on how will this blog end, when I'm done typing what will I do next, how will I deal with this difficult situation tomorrow, etc., etc. I'm still living in the future. Whether it is the near or distant future, it is still dangerous. And, it's no fun.

I went to a seminar once on dealing with anger, and this one lesson was the one that struck me out of all of them. It was in reference to daily problems or stresses. The instructor said, one of two things will happen with all of your problems. One, they will somehow work out- so you don't need to worry about them. Or, two, there is no solution, so, therefore, no point in worrying about them. Either way, there's no need to worry. My life coach says, "you can't worry your carpet red". Worry is not an active verb, it is entirely passive. Hence, it has no point.

I would love to represent that. I would love to dive into my life, not worried or focused on the outcome, even if only seconds away. This is what Tolle talks of as "the power of now". Right now, there are no problems. It's when you live in the future or the past that problems exist. It's finally starting to make sense.



Seeing the light that is the present.