Here is some food for thought:
Live in the present - This piece of advice is so often cited it has become a reason for NOT living in the present, since so much of the "present" now consists of people lecturing us about how we should live in it.
Actually the recollected past and the anticipated future are both quite nourishing places. The present nearly always involves a soup of distractions; it contains the thing that's important, plus lots of things that get in the way.
Recollecting the moment you stood in front of a favourite painting/sculpture, for example, is often better than the moment itself, in recollection you can strip out all the things that were unimportant: your sore feet, the couple talking loudly behind you, the queue for admission. Memory pares down the moment to its essence.
The same is true of the birth of a child, a kiss, a bushwalk. In memory, the experience is at its most intense and pure. After remembering these things in blissful reverie, we can then anticipate similar, or better, experiences in the future, the hoped-for experience fizzing in our mind in a way that is pure and unencumbered.
I'm not attacking the present. It's highly useful in prompting both recollection and anticipation - the real things in life.
"Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start."
~~ Nido Qubein
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| Here is a picture of Joseph, 10 years ago (July 2009). Love that boy! |
