The Power Of Now

As one year ends and another begins, we humans love to reflect on the past and dream toward the future. And to an extent, those are enjoyable, healthy and interesting pastimes.

This condition is amplified for people like me whose birthday falls on the first day of the new calendar. Numbers whirl through our heads as our ages add up; the cycle of the calendar year  reinforces our personal odometers, and it’s easy to get lost in the whir of past and future.

But the truth of our lives lies neither before us or ahead of us. The truth of our lives lies in the now.
This moment - the very moment that I write this, the very moment you read this - that is all we have.

We can’t change the past, we can’t impact the future.

All we have is now.

The choices we make in our present moment - those are the choices that matter.

When we live fully present in the moment, the regrets and successes of our past lose their power to shame us or distract us, the formidable challenges and exciting plans of the future break down into  steps that we can act upon, one day at a time. We can manage anything and everything when we simply live in the moment. And that, I have learned, is also where our purest joys can be found.

Call it a resolution or an intention or a firm number one on the top of my 2019 To Do List.

But I am devoting myself to the practice of staying in the moment, or as Eckhart Tolle, would say, living in the power of now.