Whenever I think about living in the present, somehow I always end up thinking about the pirates. There’s a certain poetic justice about the infinite horizon looming before you, the shore not even properly behind you, as you dangle somewhere in the middle of depthless blue waves. Blue beneath, blue above, and the orange of the dusk casting shadows all about.
There’s something transient and utterly free about being among the waves. Just the moment to savour and forever to chase.
There’s a future, and a past, but you’re not bound by either of them. You run after tomorrow, you remember the past, you live in the present.
What people want to figure out is how to live in the present. It’s something we are obsessed with. It’s something that has been gaining unprecedented popularity in the modern world. Because, today, it’s something that we need to be reminded of. Something we need to be told to do. Something we need to learn to do.
The Present is something that is being valued even more so now that people are beginning to realise that it is precious. That neither the past not the future are there to hold on to.
All these are tangible things. You can’t see them, or touch them. Past and present and future are not places that you and and stand in. It’s not a circle drawn in chalk, it’s nothing you can occupy materially. It’s metaphorical more than anything. Living in the present means moving forward, keeping pace with life. It means not being stuck. It means accepting every phase of life, if not with delight, then atleast with determination.
Live In The Moment
Living in the present means accepting the fact that life goes on and that change is inevitable. Living in the present means adapting yourself accordingly.
Carpe diem is the Latin phrase which means ‘to seize the day’. It tells you to focus on what is there now. Appreciate it, consume it whole, because once it’s gone, it’s just another page added in the book of memories, there to look at but not to experience.
You’ve heard about multitasking? Try the opposite for a while. Focus your attention on the task at hand. Try to give yoir undivided attention to whatever you’re doing right now. For example, right now, you’re reading this paragraph. Just read this paragraph without thinking about anything else, without even thinking about the next paragraph. See what you can get out of this moment, this minute of reading.
When you’re reading a novel, just read that novel. Don’t think about incomplete assignments or errands you have to run or emails you forgot to reply to or poeple you wish you’d talked to more or people you should’ve avoided. Don’t think about what you’ll be doing in the next decade, or the next year, or even the next day.
When you’re alive today, focus on today. What comes next is going to be unexpected, you can’t ever guess it, amd that’s what makes it all interesting.
What comes next will be dealt with when it comes.
The Future Is Full Of Possibilities
The future is, above everything, unknown. The future is open and free and that’s what makes the future so enticing and so intimidating. Anything might happen. Anything might be brought about, made real, made the present. Anything and everything is at the tips of your fingers and that’s also what makes the pressure so heavy. There’s so much expectation that’s attached to our notion of the future. We want it to be everything and we want to have a say in bringing it about.
I’m not saying that we can’t shape our future. I’m not saying that the future is already set in stone and we can’t do anything to change it. What I’m saying is that the future is unknown and sometimes, we need to keep it that way. It’s unknown and there’s a sort of freedom in ignorance too. In not knowing what might come next and waiting for it to reveal itself.
There’s freedom in hoping, in expecting, in wanting and in the possibility of wishes being fulfilled.
But the trouble begins when we start planning. The trouble, in earnest, begins as soon as we start worrying. We worry if the future we want is going to be given to us, if we can create it. We worry about where we’re going to end up. We worry if we’re going to get that degree, that apartment, that job. We worry about wealth, about health, about everything there is to worry about. We keep thinking and keep planning and we keep getting depressed as those plans get twisted and change shape.
Because we forget that it’s not all in our hands. There’s something else working as well, and no matter how many plans we make, they always will have to account for and be influenced by unknown, uncontrallable factors.
As long as we set expectations for a particular kind of future, those expectations are going to be dashed. Because it can never be just as you imagine it. It might be similar, if you’re lucky, but there’ll still be something different. There will be something you didn’t imagine, didn’t even consider, didn’t know could ever exist. And therein lies the thrill of it all. That’s the beauty of possibilities.
There are a million things that can go this way or that. A million roads. A million scenarios this life can play out. If you already have a picture in your mind and compare every scenario with that picture, thinking that everything that is different is bad by default, you’re going to miss out.
There’s a difference between planning for the future and holding your future in a vicelike grip, binding it in impossible expectations. There’s a difference between and hoping and holding that hope like a bird in a cage.
Plan, if you wish. Plan for everything you want, everything you’ve wished for, but don’t limit yourself to that plan. Accept that there are different versions of your plan.
Try not to worry.
Accept that whatever will come, will come anyway, worrying won’t stop it, so might as well save yourself the trouble now. Whatever will come, will be dealt with when it does. Until then, what you have is everything.
The Past Is A Well Of Memories
It seems like unnecessarily futile advice for someone to let go of the past. If there’s something that really haunts you from your past, that makes to visit it again and again like a wilting garden you can’t help but water anyway, then there’s nothing a few words from a blog will do to you except make you really frustrated.
What does it even mean to let go of the past? As if the past were something tangible, something you could hold and hide in the cup of your palms. As if the past could be forgotten just like that. Just on someone’s command.
As if all it took was these five words—let go of your past—for you to actually do it, just like that.
But it’s never that easy for someone who’s already tried. It’s very easy to preach and advice and then expect someone else to benefit from that advice. But it’s not easy to actually do it.
The past is a well of stagnant water. Cherished or despised, the water is going to remain there, you can’t ever empty it out without emptying your essence out as well. You can only make peace with it, learn to swim in it occasionally, amd know when you need to step out and dry yourself.
The well is full of water that I can be both something that you remember fondly, or something that you wish to escape. The past is yours either way.
It is yours to accept and yours to move on from. No one can force you to make peace with your past. That’s entirely in your hands.
As soon as you realise that, you will start moving towards life.
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