"If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.
- Jim Carrey

 

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
- John Lennon

Our entire lives are based on the future. Think about it. Ironic isn’t it? We live now, to live later. We go to school to graduate, we get a job to have money later, we meet people to get married and build a family. We set up our lives for the prospect of being happy later.

My question to you is: what about the now?

It seems like we get so into looking forward to the future we forget to stop and look around. Have you walked the same path every day of the year, and only after 6 months or so you finally noticed something interesting that’s been there all along? Where were you looking? Or were you looking at all? Life nowadays is so stressful and busy, it seems like we have retreated to living in our heads. And our bodies simply serve the purpose of transporting our head.

Have we forgotten how to live in the moment? Why do I say “forgotten”? Because we had that gift. When we were children.

I love watching children. It’s a type of therapy for me. Not playing with them, simply watching is enough. It seems to me that children are the embodiment of everything that we adults have lost: innocence, sense of adventure, unstoppable curiosity and thirst for discovering new things, the lack of fear of failure, the confidence in their safety and happiness. Children do not need two weeks to plan something fun. They know that every moment is an opportunity. They believe in the opportunity. If you think about it, its almost like… magic.

“Everyday, God gives us the sun- and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Everyday, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived that moment, that it doesn’t exist- that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant that we are doing something mundane, like putting the front door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour, or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists- a moment all the power of the stars becomes a part of us to perform miracles.”- Osho

Now, I want you to go outside and take a full minute to just look at the sky. One minute. Look up, breathe. Feel alive.