Dance with the Present Moment and Experience Real Life

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

In my life, as I try to grasp the present, I’ve found that many triggers jolt us away from the Now.

The triggers are omnipresent, forever invading. We don’t even notice them. Life can quickly become one trigger after another, dragging us away from what life was supposed to be.

Then, when real life happens, we tend to see life itself as a distraction. When really, we couldn’t be more wrong. The things we focused on were typically not real life at all. And the things that distracted us were real life, calling to us.

Real life was the rare human moment that someone wanted to share with us. But when it finally happened, we failed to realize it and shrugged it off.

It was the birds singing, but we were too busy to notice. It was the stranger on the street who was having a bad day and needed help. Real life was the sunrise, sunset, and the stars above. Or the face of your loved one that you hadn’t bothered to truly look at.

But when these things happened, we thought they were the distraction, not real life itself.

The distractions from real life were in the job that we do, where if we ceased to exist, someone else would fill the slot within 48 hours. It was the negative and judgmental words that we yell at ourselves in our minds. It was the worries about the stock market going up or down. It was the concern over the most negative news story of the day.

We thought we were living real life in these times, but we were not in the present moment here. Instead, we were upset about the past or worried about the future or focused on our made-up problems. Or perhaps, we were just distracted by nonsense.

As we become so-called mature and modern adults, we get to a point where whatever it is pulling us into the Now becomes the thing that we wish to avoid. The Now falls into the background. We somehow manage to escape the unescapable.

Adults have escaped from the present as if it were a disaster to be averted. But we weren’t meant to escape the Now. It’s like trying to outrun your shadow. Humans today are disjointed from their own shadow, living in a world of illusion when they become disconnected from the Now.

So why do we seek to escape it if this cannot be done?

The present may be too powerful for us to handle. It is a zone where anything could happen. The plans you had may work, or they may come crashing down. Your feelings may be validated or dismissed. A revolutionary idea may help you find success, cause you to have a massive failure or even both.

But rather than give in to the power of the present moment, we often wish to take power back for ourselves.

Our inflated egos make us want to hold on to the need to control, plan, achieve, and predict.

Some mysterious Now couldn’t possibly be at the reins of this life – no, we mortal and temporal humans feel that we are the ones in power. This is the illusion that we work on maintaining all our lives. Our lives become not life but rather the illusion of one.

I was once driving to work, and I saw a disheveled man with a chaotic, long beard. He was swaying his hands almost like a musical conductor. He seemed to be guiding traffic and buses to go where they were going. This man did not work for the city. He had a wild smile as if he was having the time of his life. Somehow, I understood what was happening. In this man’s mind, he was controlling the universe. He directed the traffic, the pedestrians, and perhaps even the animals. In his mind, he had orchestrated it all.

But of course, they were all doing what they wanted to do, and he was pretending to have made it happen that way. He felt the power and the control but had none.

Sometimes, that feels like the analogy for what humanity has become. We insist on maintaining control over that which is actually out of our hands. We are happy to take the credit when it works in our favor, but any time something goes wrong, it was out of our hands.

Yet, just maybe, things were always out of our hands. I can’t force my heart to beat, but it continues to happen. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s because it was never in my control, to begin with.

Maybe we are trying to control a universe that is actually out of our hands.

We find it difficult to let the Now be whatever it will be, to give us whatever it has to give, or to take from us whatever it wishes to take. And so, every day, we are resisting that present moment, as we have made it into the enemy.

We are not in the present moment because we have made it the enemy of our lives. We have succumbed to the triggers all around us.

Someone could spend a lifetime documenting these triggers that lead us away from the present, away from the Now.

When we have scheduled our lives away, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have plans and perceive nothing beyond them, we have resisted the present moment.

When we convince ourselves that we are failures and get stuck in self-pity, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have rejected a chance occurrence just because we did not expect it, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have labeled with language that which words cannot confine, we have resisted the present moment.

When we needed the security of knowing the outcomes of everything we may do, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have insisted on living by the patterns we have always lived by, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have denied our wild, spontaneous, and free side, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have failed to see the beauty in the beautiful, the sadness in the sad, and the wonder in the wonderful, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have gotten lost in thoughts rather than lost in the experience that is life, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have been convinced by false thoughts and ideas that do not stand up to reality, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have confused our temporary selves, emotions, and problems with being more important than the universe, we have resisted the present moment.

We do these things. I do them, you do them, and perhaps everyone I have ever known does them.

Seeing these triggers for what they are can take us even further away from the present, strangely enough. In seeing them, we start to notice them, label them, think about them, and interpret them, and all of this takes us further away from life.

But if we give ourselves to the Now, then there is nothing left to resist, and we become a part of that Now.

We don’t need to put much effort into this, as effort often works against the now. Going with the tides of now is effortless, but because we have resisted this for so long, it may appear to take effort to get there.

The Now is happening to us, whether or not we are ready to take it in and accept that. The power is more in the present than it is in us. We are predicting it, reacting to it, and explaining it, but are we experiencing it fully and living it? That is another matter.

Rather than grasping at the present, which cannot be grasped, it makes more sense to dance with it. We can focus on becoming aware and in sync with real life and strive to find a piece of that now. Even if we can’t have all of it, we can find some of it for ourselves.

The alternative is to live a life outside of the now. What kind of life is that?

Living longer is a focus for many, but it doesn’t mean much if we didn’t actually live those years. What percent of our lives took place in sync with the Now? That may be a more interesting metric to shoot for.

I’m not sure that being in the present is a skill or practice. It may be as simple as letting go of our ego, of our need to control and direct this thing called life. Rather than living the illusion of life, we can let it go and truly live.

Humans do have great power. But how great is that power when our lives are temporary, and every loved one will die? How great is it when everything built will fall, most of our predictions are wrong, and much of our lives occur in the imaginary world of ideas?

Our true power was in our ability to acknowledge the power of the present and to become one with it.

Join me in a never-ending dance with the present moment. That is the goal of this life if there ever was one.

If you are interested in learning more about the Present Moment, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.

5 Lessons I Learned or Re-Learned this Year

Introduction

As we near the end of the year, sometimes I become more reflective, asking myself if the year went well. Did things go as well as I had hoped? Could I have done something more? Could I have worked smarter or more effectively?

This year, I think we all have been forced to think about what we truly value in this life. For most of us, we have felt some form of hardship. There have been lost lives of loved ones, economic struggles, loneliness, and added stress for many. The troubles are many, but what can we learn from them? That is what matters.

Here is what I learned (or re-learned) this year:

1.     Truly Value Every Day

I am not immune from everyday problems. I can also find myself in arguments over trivial matters, or losing touch with the present moment, or forgetting what is truly important sometimes. The journey is always unfolding and not a direct path to anywhere. There are bumps along the way, and we need to keep going, keep moving toward improving and becoming something better.

Whatever this experience is that we are having, that is the same for all, yet different for all, is worth it. We need to live every day with consciousness, with a will to do something for ourselves and others. Our everyday decisions seem so minor and inconsequential at times, but the impact can be major. Collect all those minor, seemingly inconsequential moments of humanity, and they mean something when they are all put together.

For example, one person’s loneliness makes you feel like you don’t matter. But imagine the collective loneliness of humanity, and you see that we are together in this. Upon realizing that he is part of a larger collective loneliness, the loneliest person in the world may be motivated to help alleviate this suffering in his fellow humans.

There is tremendous value in every single day. Every day is a gift, and I aim to see it for what it is. Suffering can seem like a big burden, a curse, but even this is a gift. Suffering is what connects all of humanity. We have all suffered in some way, and so we should all aim to help each other when we can. Rather than running from the suffering, it can be worthwhile to connect with it and reflect on it and see that it can help us to build some bridges with one another in this life.

When I was younger, at times, I felt that I was suffering tremendously (e.g., mental, not physical pain) and that I was alone. I wish I would have spoken to someone about this back then. Many people in my life would have listened, but I kept it as my own burden. But that suffering has helped me connect with and help people, so it has been a blessing in that sense.

When I help others, I can see clearly that whatever I have suffered was nothing in the grand scheme.

Sometimes I think about my youth or the young people I have known, and it is so obvious to me that we do not truly understand all that we have during that time in our life. In your youth, you have all your energy, all the time, love, and no true responsibility of your own. Yet, our young people often have no true understanding of all they have been given, of the work and trouble it takes to support them. They have no idea of what they have and will not understand until they double in age. Even at my age (35), sometimes I wonder if I will not truly have the perspective to know what I have in this very moment until I am much older. How will I truly comprehend what I have until I am on the verge of losing it?

But rather than focus too much on that, I return to the concept that we must value the day, the now, what we have, right now. Aim to see it for what it is, the greatest glory that we could be bestowed with. Even if all seems wrong, you are here. That means something. You have the chance to do something, to turn it all around, to experience one more moment, and the next, and the next.

2.     The Right Moment is Now (Usually)

Often, I will find myself planning things out for the future. I may think: One day, I want to travel, to read all the books I would like, to tell people what I truly wanted to tell them, to write that novel, and so on. I have had all these thoughts, yet instead of waiting too long or daydreaming about it too much, I ended up jumping in and doing these things.

Through my college years and in graduate school, I always wanted to read books for fun, but I felt that I never had the time. This was a lie – I could have read more. When I finished graduate school, I decided that I finally had the time, and since then, I have read about 40-50 books per year. I’m sure I could find the time to read even more, but I have been happy with this. Now, I make an effort to read the right books, rather than focusing too much on the number. I realized that I could always make the excuse that I didn’t have the time to read the books I wanted, but if this was what I truly wanted to do, then I must make time for it now.

As another example, my wife always wanted to live in Europe, so rather than wait for the right time, in 2018-2019, she accepted a position working in France. I didn’t know French at all, and my wife had an intermediate level in the language but had not studied it for many, many years. We could have tried waiting for the right time, and it may have never come. Instead, she applied for jobs, she was accepted, and we went. We had fantastic experiences there, and bad ones too, just like with anything else in life. But at least we went. We went even though we could have waited for a better time. But if we did, we may have never gone.

I have countless stories like this – where I considered waiting to do something, but instead, I decided the time was Now, and I just did it. Often, my plans were just stories I made up in my mind to feel better about something. Think of any plans you’ve ever made that involved years into the future. Did those usually go the way you expected? Or did new things come up that interfered with those plans, time and again?

In my life, I have learned over, and over that often, we are just making excuses and waiting for a later and later time. Of course, we should probably engage in some form of planning and thinking about our life’s decisions. But often, we may just be scared to make a leap. The truth is if we keep waiting for that right time, it may never come.

If you can do it Now, do it Now. Whatever it may be that your heart is set on doing.

Of course, the world as it is now, for many of us, the time is NOT now. We all have to make our own choices in the end. For some, now is the time to take risks and do everything you ever wanted to do. For others, this is the time to be careful and stay safe. Perhaps there is a way to stay safe and still make progress on your dreams.

In essence, what I want to say is that you should not wait until tomorrow to enjoy the day. Find a way to make the best of today, for it may be all we have.

(If you do decide to take some risks, please be mindful of the point below.)

3.     What if Everyone Did What I Was About to Do? What Would Happen?

This is a Thought that has run through my head more than ever this year. Often, I see people take action, and I wonder if they would have done this if they had just taken a moment to consider what the world would be like if everyone behaved that way.

This is a Thought that can be used to help you take better actions that help more people. And also to help avoid taking hurtful or negative actions that could hurt more people.

If you watch or read the news, you will often hear about people in the world who are hurting others. And some of this is malicious, but some of this may happen just because people do not stop and consider: What if everyone did this? An example is littering. When someone on the streets tosses a cigarette butt, or a soda can, or anything else, many of us may fail to see how this matters in the grand scheme. But humans follow the behavior of others quite closely. If a parent does this, then his kids probably will, too, perhaps even his neighbors. If everyone did this, the streets would be filled with so much trash and make our cities look like public waste bins.

This thought (What if everyone did what I was about to do?) helped me become a more sociable person. Being sociable is not so difficult. If you keep other people in mind, then you will quickly improve your social skills. Perhaps when you are in a group, you like to take charge and lead the way. That is fine, but what if everyone behaved this way? It would be difficult to have fun if everyone wanted to lead the way, right? So perhaps, instead of assuming you are the leader and making decisions, you could propose something and see if people agree. You could still lead, just not in a forceful or intimidating way.

Some basic questions you can ask in different situations are:

• If everyone did this, how happy would we be?

• If everyone did this, how much suffering would this cause?

• If everyone did this, how much would we accomplish?

• If everyone did this, how many lives would be lost?

• If everyone did this, would it be helpful or hurtful?

4.     Love is What Matters

The bonds we have are not to be taken for granted. We need to remember to connect with the most important people in our lives. Day by day, these bonds can grow or recede, but they rarely stay static.

When we have love, we are alive, but we aren’t just meant to have it, but also to give it, spread it, and nurture it.

The greatest pain of our lives is when our love is lost. Either a relationship ending, or of course, a death. This is sending us a clear signal that out of all the things we worked on and strived for in our lives if we didn’t have love, then we didn’t have much.

That pain is only there to remind us of how much that love truly mattered.

One of the best feelings to have that can transcend any tactile sensation is to have love. Love is not just the joy of being cared for but also the joy of caring about someone. When you are cared for and loved, you naturally have more time and attention to love others.

When you can connect to the common experience of joy, pain, laughter, loss, sorrow, desire, and apprehension, you then can love. So if you are human, even if you have never known love, you already have it in you, as this is something that can never be taken away, the will, need desire for, and power to love.

Pay attention to the ones you love, and further, pay attention to that feeling of love. When we do this, we see that we could do more. Make the time for that person asking for your love. It could be anyone that shows up in your life today. It may even be everyone.

Perhaps everyone who crosses paths with you today, intentional or not, was just there to ask for your love.

They may all cloak themselves, hiding their true intention, to get your love, making up other reasons that they need to see you, but perhaps, that was the one true reason. How will you respond to them?

I have been making efforts to stop the bounds and limits of my love. When I see someone that needs it, I hope I am there. I hope you see this too and can expand in your love.

In another post titled The Path to a True and Fruitful Life, I also discuss the importance of love.

5.     Make Your Own Path

In my business, I often think that I should do something because it is what most other writers or business people are doing. Yet time and again, I find that I am pleased to create my own path. This way, if I make mistakes, they are my own, and I learn from them. Nothing terrible has ever happened to me. I write, publish, promote, learn, and grow, and that is all. The rest are the details.

Something I have come to understand through the years is that I don’t like to promote. This often happens for writers, as they usually prefer to write. I am the same. I recognize the need for promotion – I do it, but I aim to spend the least amount of time that I can on this. I wish to do it effectively and quickly, and that is all. I have developed systems over the years to help accomplish this.

I prefer to spend my time writing, learning, growing, loving, and spreading my messages in multiple languages so that more people can benefit from what I have to say. There is only so much time and energy to put into a day. Ask yourself if you truly believe in what you are doing. When I promote too much and invest too much time in that, I feel like I have wasted my time because I have not contributed something new and useful to the world.

Are there activities like that in your life? Can you do them less and still get the positive results you need while minimizing the time you spend on them?

The point here is this:

Don’t feel that you must follow a certain path. Define yourself as you would like to be. Create your own route that only you will go on, that no one else could imitate.

When I was a young child, people always told me that I looked like my father, and perhaps at that time, I thought I was him or destined to be like him. Other times, people confused my brother and me as twins (we were close in age and similar in size, but we looked different, actually). So I was often compared to someone else. Then in time, I realized that I was my own person and that I needed to pave my own path.

Life isn’t as fun, or meaningful living in another’s shadow – you have to find your own way. Be willing to accept help or guidance, but in the end, the choices you make are your own.

If you would like to learn more about my path, or My Purpose Journey, read here.

Concluding Thoughts

This year, I learned or re-learned the following:

• Truly value every day

• The right moment is now (usually)

• The value of thinking: What if everyone did what I was about to do? What would happen?

• Love is what matters

• Make your own path

These are some of the most important lessons that have come to me this year. I hope you take the time to reflect on what you learned this year and what you can improve next year.

From Feelings of Worthlessness to Worthiness

Sometimes we may feel a crushing weight of worthlessness. The problem with living for the future, as many people do, is that we know where the future will end for all of us. Eventually, we will end up dead as everyone before us has ended up. Somehow, knowing our end destination can make the whole journey seem worthless. But perhaps this knowledge of what will happen to us is meant to remind us that we need to focus on what is happening now. At any moment, our whole life can be robbed from us, and we will pass on to the next dimension.

But this means that our present, fleeting moment is precious. The limited time we have is precious.

We can obsess over the end and whatever it may truly mean, or we can move beyond this and live our lives fully in the Now.

If we bring our attention fully to the Now, then we are fully alive and not adding agonies about the past or the future to our lives. The other thing we can do to overcome this feeling of worthlessness is remember that we must make our own goals and pathways. We cannot rely on someone else or another system to determine our worth and our path. For when they abandon us, we are left feeling nothing but worthlessness. Our worthiness must emanate from within. We must define our life path and our life mission and pursue it wholeheartedly.

I often think of this quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“All men live lives of quiet desperation.”

What many of us fear most is what deep inside we desire the most. That is, to truly, truly live by breaking away from the daily grind of patterns we have set into like a stone. We are constantly doing things today based on all the things we have done in the past, finding it difficult to escape this shadow of the past that hovers around us.

Many of us want to get out of here.

We want to escape from ourselves – our lives, who we are, the daily pains and challenges of life, society, and everything.

The escapism that we see rampant in today’s society, where people are sucked into movies, reality TV, video games, sitcoms, drinking, drugs, and any activity that removes us from our real lives, goes to show that many of us are living these lives of quiet desperation. We want to get out of here, but perhaps we don’t want any of the risks that come with it. We don’t want to pack our bags and move out, only to have people say we went crazy or for our family to become upset. We want to quit that job but feel we can’t because we need a steady income to live our normal lives.

In a sense, we feel trapped. I always thought that the wealthy must have found a way to escape this. Still, I feel that hearing about all the financial issues even the wealthy have, it makes me think that they get sucked into feeling that they need to maintain a certain lifestyle. Therefore they get trapped into their quiet lives of desperation as well. We come to feel that we need others to think of us in a certain way. If I’m the professor, I need people to think of me as a serious academic who has contributed unique and valuable research to the world. If I’m a businessperson, I need people to believe I am successful and value my products. If I’m a parent, I need people to think that I am a good parent and that I do the best for my kids. This need to be perceived in a certain way makes us feel trapped in the end.

In life, we acquire responsibilities and things we must do, which is just what it means to be an adult. It seems that we do not have the real option to escape. But what about those people without obligations to others? They are young, without kids, without anyone that they must care for, but they tend to think that they are too young to know what they should focus on in life and look to their parents or elders. But what if all of their elders are living quiet lives of desperation? And what if these are the people guiding our youth?

For any stranger you see today, keep in mind that perhaps they live a quiet life of desperation. Perhaps life is weighing them down. Maybe they’re using whatever energy they have left to smile and pretend that everything is alright.

We all want something more, don’t we? We want something other than what we have, something other than what we are, but then instead of working at it, we escape our lives. This drives us further into the need to escape the pitiful lives that we create for ourselves.

Instead, we must double down on our own lives. We must invest the time in nurturing ourselves and the people we touch daily. This will result in a bettering of ourselves and our circumstances. Perhaps once in a while, we should engage in a real-life escape or journey rather than trying to escape from our lives through media. The real-life journeys (e.g., travel, spiritual journeys, doing something you always wanted to do but never made time for) may nurture the soul and fill us with learning, understanding, wisdom, culture, and such good qualities, rather than just robbing us of our time. Perhaps in these real-life escapes, we will find that we want to escape that escape and ultimately find ourselves pleased to be back home, the way things always were.

There are many times in life when we will be frustrated, tired, feeling unwanted or lost, or as if we don’t matter. There are times when we may be tempted to give up hope. What we should always remember, no matter how hard things get, is that this is part of the journey too. Fiction writers understand quite well that they need to give their protagonist many obstacles, sometimes tremendous obstacles, for the story to be interesting. So sit back and remember that you are part of the human story. And perhaps you have been given more obstacles than others to bear. And this is fine. This is just a part of your journey. The journey moves you toward something greater and better, but you may have to get through the mud before you find your way.

The human mind and spirit are powerful enough that if every time we falter or find ourselves in difficult circumstances, we were to think, Oh no, I am so dumb. I’m going to get fired. Then I’ll lose my house, then the kids, I’ll die in a ditch. How could we possibly expect to thrive under immense stress? We must always train the mind to do better, to be a beaming light in the face of darkness.

When an unexpected disaster happens, think: That’s alright. We’re going to come back stronger than ever after we get through this. When you are sick and have disturbing symptoms, you may think: That’s fine, my body is just purging this sickness from my body. And when you make a big mistake, think: That’s fine – I’ve had the opportunity to learn something here so that I can help make sure my colleagues nor I ever make this mistake again.

We must learn to train the mind to be calm through the storm. When we find ourselves in turbulent times, where everything seems chaotic and disordered, we must keep calm, composed and figure out the next step. It doesn’t help to allow the mind to run through all of the worse possibilities that may happen. If running through all the worst-case scenarios makes you panicky and unable to think clearly, then this is not helping you or anyone.

We must stay calm through the storm.

Sometimes in challenging circumstances, we need to stay strong to survive the present to live another day and figure everything out with a calm, cool head.