Living in the Now

"Past has gone, forget it; future is far away, don’t worry; present is here, use it."

If only we could decode the wisdom in this quote, we may be able to make our lives a lot easier, but easier said than done. The only force that can either facilitate us or keep us away from using the present is our mind. It is the most powerful thing, in a very awesome and mysterious way, that human beings possess in their bodies and without any doubt it rules over human lives by shaping them according to its functioning.

The mind’s favourite pastime is preoccupation. It loves to live either in the past or in the future and this needs no training at all. Despite the fact that the outcomes of the past events in one’s life cannot be changed, the brain enjoys going over all those events, tragic or fantastic, petty or vital, charming or horrific and gets a strange kind of satisfaction or dejection depending upon the experiences of the past.

Likewise, the other favourite preoccupation for the mind is to live in the future. The mind remains in a state of worrying about what might go wrong in the future or what might be an exceptional experience. Regarding tragedies and sad incidents, if the future flight of thoughts were limited to thoughts only, that would have been fine but the problem is that the mind, being an exceptionally powerful magnet, starts attracting those tragic events, which are focused upon owing to worries, into one’s life in whose skull it resides. This is how some people die many times before the actual death; fail many times before the actual failure in the future and face a variety of tragedies before the often-thought-of tragedies actually happen in their lives. The interesting thing is that sometimes those tragedies never happen depending upon the intensity level of one’s focus. The mind’s flight into the future also needs no training. When our minds think about the past or the future, they are on autopilot mode and we lose all control on them. But to bring our minds to the very moment we live in, to the present moment, to the now is a real challenge that needs rigorous training.

Living in the moment is what we all need because it is the real life. Living in the moment means coming to the now because we only live in the now moment. Whatever we did in the past is gone and has lost its reality and whatever we will do in the future are mere plans, far-fetched dreams and ambitions. They are not yet the actual physical reality. That proves that we live bit by bit, second by second or more accurately now by now. When we come out of the autopilot mode of our mind, which is also known as preoccupation, we come back to life and start living the very moment. If we don’t cherish that moment, we do not live the true and literal meaning of life. In short, coming out of the autopilot mode is coming to the now and this situation is called mindfulness, the opposite phenomenon to preoccupation.

But it should not be forgotten that living in the future for the fulfilment of our dreams is a wonderful idea provided that we think about positive outcomes: success, wealth, health, love and fame, because that is what the mind is going to attract and that is what most people live for. Attracting positive outcomes can only be possible when we know how the mind works and how it hijacks our lives if it is allowed to go on autopilot. It has been researched that in autopilot mode, the mind is mostly engaged in negative pursuits and creates negativity effortlessly. That is why it is very important to know about the working mechanism of the brain; how to stop it from going in autopilot mode; and how to train it to think positively to manifest future dreams.

Multi-tasking is another aspect of preoccupation which means doing several things simultaneously. Multi-tasking results in the lack of quality in everything that we do and every action that we perform. For example, when we are over the phone, we mostly find ourselves engaged in working on a computer, taking down notes, giving instructions to others using the body language or driving a car. All tasks done in this fashion seriously lack quality due to the absence of attention on the part of the doer and need re-doing in majority of the cases. There is one extreme disadvantage of such sort of multi-tasking i.e. stress. It is because the process of re-doing and bringing in the required quality to a task takes double time. Therefore, we always run out of time and remain in a continuous state of chasing things around. Such a situation, continued over a long period of time, creates stress which is the mother of majority of ills that we have in our society today.

Paying attention on purpose to the present or the now and then discerning anything with clarity is called mindfulness. This is a very powerful state of the mind where the healing process takes place. God has bestowed upon our minds great healing powers. These healing powers are only activated when we are mindful and consciously know what we are doing. When we live in the now, the mind is extremely relaxed and in this state of ecstasy, it starts fixing our maladies, whether big or small. As discussed, the mind loves to live like a vagabond and goes wherever it likes in imagination, whereas on the other hand the body lives its own life. It is one of the most difficult tasks, more difficult than moving mountains, to bring the vagabond mind and the non-nomadic body into a state of perfect harmony. If we can achieve this harmony between the mind and the body, we must expect unparalleled things to happen.

Mindfulness or paying attention is a skill that can be learnt but unfortunately it is taken for granted. Teachers in schools, colleges and universities keep telling their students to pay attention and sometimes get cross with them for not being mindful, especially in schools; parents also get angry with their children for not paying attention and so on. But the problem is that no one, neither teachers nor parents, teach us how to pay attention, how to be mindful, how to live in the present and how to come out of autopilot mode of the mind to live a true life in order to achieve our dreams. Preoccupation is a dangerous commodity for all, especially for students who are in the process of laying foundations of successful and enviable lives ahead.

By learning how to focus, how to meditate and how to pay attention, monstrous maladies like stress, tension, depression and anxiety, which are the top killers of modern times, can be avoided. Now that we understand how the mind works, we are left with only one option if at all we are serious in improving the quality of our lives and manifesting our long-cherished dreams:

Either to get control of the mind and live in the now and the future at our own will or be mere helpless spectators and allow the mind to drag our lives into the kingdom of sheer negativity!

"Whatever you focus on the longest becomes the strongest."