The Present Moment

Living in the Present Moment



The current book I am reading is by Marianne Williamson. The follow blog is an excerpt from her book The Age of Miracles: I highly recommend this book to those of us in mid life and beyond.



"Wherever you've been, whatever you've done so far your entire life was building up to this moment. Now is the time to burst forth into your greatness. A greatness you could never have achieved without going through exactly the things you have gone through. Everything you've experienced was grist for the mill by which you became who you are. It is not too late. You are not too old. You are right on time. And you are better than you know."



At a certain point life becomes less about who you're becoming and more about who you've become. What you used to think of as the future has become the present and you can't help but wonder if your life wouldn't be better if you had just lived it more fully back then. But how could you? You were so busy thinking about the future.



But once you are past a certain age, you cannot believe that you wasted even one minute of your youth not enjoying it. And the last thing you want to do now is steel any more life from yourself by failing to be deeply in it while it's happening. You finally get it, not just theoretically, but viscerally….That THIS MOMENT IS ALL WE HAVE. You don't close your eyes anymore and wonder who you might be in 20 years. If you're smart, you study the tape of your current existence to monitor how you are doing now. You begin to see the present as an ongoing act of creation. You look more closely at your thoughts, behavior, and interactions with others. You understand that if you are coming at life from fear and separation, then you have no reason but to expect fear and separation in return. You seek to increase your strengths and decrease your weaknesses. You look at your wounds and you ask God to heal them. You ask forgiveness for the things you are ashamed of. You no longer seek your satisfaction in things outside yourself, or completion in other people, or peace of mind in either the past or the future. You are who you are. Not who you might one day be. Your life is what it is. Not what it might someday be. Focusing on who you are and what your life is right now, you've come to the ironic and almost amusing realization that, actually the real fun is in the journey itself.