Most of us live in the past or the future. We live in past glory or fantasizing about a future that we desire. Our minds are so into our past and future that we forget to live in the present.
The past is hardened cement. It is cast in stone. We can change it anymore. It has come and gone and will no longer come back. So past glories are just that – past glories. It is not a yardstick to measure your future. In other words, just because one was a multi-millionaire 10 years ago does not mean that one would remain a multi-millionaire 10 years down the road. Fortunes change. And if it does change, hanging on to your past will not help you recoup what you have lost. I have heard of a friend’s friend who used to live luxuriously due to his booming family business 20 years ago. The father passed way leaving the business with the children. Everything was set nicely for them and they were rich. Then the 1987 crash came and affected their business. They lost everything. While some of the siblings have managed to recover and have moved on, one of them continually hung on to the past. Now, in 2012, almost 25 years later in his 50s, he needs to ask friends for money. If you are in your 50s, not born poor, and you can’t go to the ATM and withdraw two thousand dollars, you have got a real problem in your hands. If he had let go of the past and just focus on the reality of his situation then, I believe he would have easily recovered and perhaps achieved greater heights. There were many options that he could have taken: re-education, employment, entrepreneurship etc. But constant living in the past has resulted in inertia and just not doing anything.
Therefore it is very important that we realize that our lives do not happen in the past or the future. It happens NOW. As the clock ticks, the moment is gone. In Buddhism, Vipassana Meditation trains us to be mindful. Mindfulness can be seen as the practice of “being in the moment” – but what does this actually mean? Does it mean that if we’re mindful we should never think about the past or the future, never try to plan or to reflect on our past experience?
Actually, being in the moment means being mindfully aware of what is going on right here and now, in our experience, and this includes any thinking we do about the past or future. Much of the time our experience does not have this quality of awareness or mindfulness. A lot of the time we are like robots, automatically living out habitual patterns of self-pity, anger, wish fulfillment, fear, etc. These habitual tendencies take us over and run our lives for us – without our being able to stand back and decide whether this is what we actually want to be doing. It can be a real shock when we start to realize just how habitual and automatic our lives are.
By bringing our mind back to now moment, we re-connect with our power. The reason that "now" is where all of your power exists, is because "now" is the only time you can think new thoughts and feel new feelings. We cannot think thirty seconds from now, or feel something two hours ago. We can only think NOW. We can only feel NOW. And so this moment right now is your greatest point of power.
The rest of your life awaits you!
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