Mindfulness

Time to Start Enjoying Life Now

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The downside of having goals and aspirations is that if you’re not careful you will get caught up obsessing over them and unwittingly take yourself out of the present moment, thinking of your life as on a holding pattern until you get to where you hope to go.

People live their entire adult lives this way, waiting for the infrequent milestones and devaluing their daily existence in the process. Our entire lives, from birth to death, take place in the present moment yet for many these moments pass by without much interest.

If you are healthy in mind and body then you have everything you need for happiness and fulfillment right now. You do it by mindfully come to the present moment and trying to live as fully as you can in it. Things that you have started to take for granted will revert back to the intensely interesting phenomena that they are.

One of the biggest reasons that people distance themselves from the present is that they believe they have all the time in the world, that they are basically immortal. Really recognizing their mortality and what that means for the destruction of their being is anxiety provoking. You can think of the response as overcompensation. The prospect of death is so terrifying that the solution is to ignore it completely and believe that mortality doesn’t really apply to you at all.

If you live your life constantly looking towards a distant horizon, when you get to the end of yours and see that you are mortal after all, you’ll probably look back with a profound sense of regret. If you love life, then you’ve got to ask yourself what is keeping you from living fully in it. Time is fleeting, but you retain the choice over what to do with the time allotted to you, and spending it always thinking about the future is a waste. The miracle of existence is all around you, and all you have to do to appreciate it in the same way that you did as a young child, but with much greater understanding and much greater freedom, is to take on the practice of mindfulness in your daily life, giving 100% of your attention to your immediate surroundings.