The Present Tense

We spend so much time measuring, scheduling, remembering, regretting, and worrying about what comes next that we forget to live in the moment we’re actually given. The past is a collection of fragments; the future is still unwritten. Choose. Act.

.   .   .

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it? Much has changed; much has stayed the same.

What holds true is that wherever we go, there we be.

We sometimes think there’s time to waste, or that we’re wasting it. But time is an abstraction. What we have are pictures: frame after frame, moment by moment.

We have a brief flicker of light in which to make our ripple in the universe. Then we’re gone, like a drop returning to the sea.

Our memories are fragments, imperfect and selective. We stretch our imagination to revisit a particularly good day, or desperately try to forget a terrible one.

We can check days off some arbitrary calendar, schedule appointments, make lists, and keep our hands busy to avoid the discomfort of a pause…

Or we can meet every breath with gratitude, living beyond the mechanics of getting through the day: step away from the noise, demands, and distractions that continually consume our attention, gaze curiously into the grand abyss, and let the wind move through our temporary sadness. Allow the spirit of things to unravel our sense of solidity and remind us how ephemeral all of this is.

The deepest regrets tend to arrive when it’s too late to do anything about them. So while you can still wake, breathe, feel your pulse, desire, aspire, dream, and love, take the chance to live those things.

Do it now.

Many fears lose their hold when we dare greatly. The struggles and barriers we’ve imagined for so long often prove far less formidable than they seemed.

It’s all too easy to stall our creative engines in the sticky what-if state, a disastrous holding pattern that slowly consumes what we might otherwise become.

Choose. Act.

There is nothing to fear.

Memento vivere

Trance Blackman – Nothing To Fear