One of the areas I continually struggle with is what I call “the challenge of now”. Over the years I’ve trained myself to multitask. I would like to think I was pretty good at it, but that is probably an illusion. In the last year or two (2010 and 2011), I’ve been making a conscious effort to focus on trying to single-task, trying to do one thing at a time, trying to focus on being in the moment and doing what is in that moment. It is a fairly difficult thing to do.
My mind takes to run away from me, take off in other directions, easily distracted by the thoughts of other things and other days. This captures us between the real and the unreal. The past is done, there is nothing that can be done about it, nothing that be undone in it – and it is no longer real.
The past is the echo of the real.
The past is the echo of now.
The future is also unreal. The future is unrealized potential. The future does not become real until that moment when it becomes the now.
That is a tough thing to get the brain around. Yes, the actions we choose in the now influence the availability of choices in the future, but that link is mostly unreal as well. There is rarelly anything that prevents us from making radically different choices, from taking actions that are a radical departure from the current course we’ve set ourselves on.
Realizing that life is in the moment, pulling our thoughts back into the here and the now, is always an ongoing challenge for me.
