There is a measure of tranquility that comes with living in the moment when we are neither running from our past nor chasing dreams of a better future. Do you ever find yourself longing for days gone by or lost in hopes for a better tomorrow at the expense of living in the moment? Consider asking your self this simple question, “Am I here?” If I’m not here, where am I?

Are you Here?

When my son needs a ride home from one of his friends, I can expect a text message asking this question while en route “Are you here.” Lately, my lovely wife has asked me the same question when she thinks that I’m not paying attention to her here and now. It happens less frequently than it used to, but it still happens. Recently I have been told that I hide in my home office, a room with glass doors that happens to be less than 15-feet away from the part of the house where everyone congregates. It must be those glass doors that make people think I am unreachable.

If I am not here, in the here and now, where would I be? The short answer would be “almost anywhere.” I might try living in the past, become a premium member of Classmates.com, trying to pick up where I left off some years back. If that couldn’t entice me to live in the past nothing will.

Instead of living in the past, living in the future might be a better option. But what would be my timeline, six weeks, six months, or six years? I could painstakingly plan my wardrobe for the next six weeks. I could research vacation destinations for next summer. I might even start thinking about what an empty nest would resemble. Unfortunately, external factors have away of compressing the definition of the word long in long-term planning

The issue at hand is that we connect our past to our future by a thread, and that thread is the here and the now. Strangely, the here and now is where I am drawn to; it’s where I invest my energy. I have no interest in revisiting what once was, only to the extent that I remember those costly lessons that I learned. With my plans for the future now punctuated with an asterisk, it seems fitting that my attention is drawn to how do I make the most of today; on the here and now,

“Yes, dear, I am here. There is no other place I would rather be.”

Running From Our Past

Do you remember this scene from the Disney movie The Lion King? After spending some time running from his past, Simba is forced to confront his response to the past when Rafiki whack’s him on the side of the head with his stick. Simba, reacts as expected, “Ow, what was that for?” to which Rafiki responds, “What difference does it make, it’s in the past?”

“But it still hurts” exclaimed Simba.

It does hurt, well, it can hurt. We don’t think of the past in terms of describing the specifics of how long something hurts, but how much it hurts. In contrast, when it’s a pleasant experience, we say things like, “That weekend was the best” or “the week that we were on vacation was amazing!”

The sound of the stick hitting the side of our head lingers much longer than the bump left by the impact. To live in the past, or to relive the past, we can’t avoid the sound of the stick.

Chasing our Future

We don’t have to look that far back into our past to see how some of those decisions and uncontrollable events have shaped our future. It’s a delicate and ever-changing thread, that has little to do with the calendar that connects our past to our future. Something that happened last week can have a greater impact on our future than something that occurred years ago.

Every investment advisor has a variation of this statement engrained in his vocabulary, “Past performance is not indicative of future results.” Translation, what happened in the past may or may not represent our future. The optimist would assert that it should if we prepare, we plan, and we preserve some of today for tomorrow. The pessimist would likely dismiss the need to think beyond our interests of today.

Life can and does usually happen with complete disregard for our plans. It has a way to impress upon us where our priorities must lie.

Living in the Moment

So if living in the past directs our thoughts inward (self-absorbed), running from the past implies that there is nothing to learn from which we can draw wisdom (ignorant), and obsessing about our future can give us heartburn and ulcers (escaping), what’s left? What remains is what is left in the middle, our here and our now. We can plan for the future as we should, we just need to factor in some uncertainty if we expect that our plan will come to fruition without flaws or that someone else’s plan doesn’t collide with our own.”

Then there are those that are living in the moment when suddenly gun-fire breaks out; a time that was meant to be carefree will forever be defined by panic and mayhem, that in itself makes living in the moment unimaginable and unbearable. Living in the moment is suddenly interrupted by someone who was running from their past and chose an action that deprived so many the chance to chase their future.

With that, I leave you with this, “When did it become commonplace to inflict our misery on others? When did life get so cheap?

Thanks for reading and liking; sharing is aways appreciated

Al and his faithful and patient sidekick, Ivy the wonder pup.

Thank for waiting Ivy, Grab you leash if you still want to go for a walk