Stop Pissing on The Present Moment if you Want to Find Happiness
Always yield to the present moment. There is only now.
We are pros at avoiding the present.
We rush through everything.
Pause. Now.
Evaluate how your day has been so far. What stood out? Were you present, or rushing as usual, and missing life's precious moments.
Only 6 people in the whole of a busy metro station in Washington DC traffic stopped to listen to Joshua Bell, a man whose ticket had totally sold out a few days before.
In the Darley, and Batson experiment, it was expected that the seminary students who had been taught about the good samaritan story would stop, and help a man on their way as they went to preach in a nearby building.
What determined if they stopped is whether they were time-pressed, or not.
Your quality of happiness, and life is no different. If you always feel time-pressed, even a simple act of pausing, stopping, breathing, tasting food, being present in conversations will be affected.
Happiness is now when the time begins.
Jon Kabat Zinn always reminds us to be present, and be fully engaged. He says, “there is nowhere to rush to”
When you are not in the past, or in the future, Dan Harris writes, you piss on the present.
Peek into your happiness code
The present is where you experience your future.
The present moment is where you experience your past.
The present moment is your life unfolding
Nowadays, it's possible for a person with no development background to create products like a pro developer. Thanks to the no-code, low-code features in most applications. To be able to see the complex internal engineering that is making coding simpler is the ability called peeking into the code
The present moment is your happiness code.
You piss on the present moment when you:
- Hustle through your to-do list
- Rush through traffic unaware
- Hussle through conversations blindly
- Hussle through your meals
- Sleepwalk through your life
- Get carried away by the anxiety of goals, work, and challenges
- Allow your self-critical mind to perennially screw your life, and others
- Wake up in the morning mindlessly
- Read a book with the aim of finishing but with zero engagement
- Run through meetings while mentally absent
- Hurtle headlong through your twenty-four-hour, and wonder at end of the day how you did things so robotically.
To stop pissing on the present, start practicing these 6 things:
- Makes the present your friend, and not your enemy. Yield into the present every day.
- Don’t live like many people whom Eckart Tolle describes as habitually living as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment.
- Take mindful breaths. Do it now.
- Don't allow things to own you. Use Ali Ibn Abi Talib's wisdom that says detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you
- Be willing, and open to trying new things.
- Don’t be identified with your thoughts. When your thoughts come up, just let them be. Do what Shunryu Suzuki advised his students — Leave your front door, and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come, and go. Just don’t serve them tea.
There is no other moment. Now is the moment. Repeat this
There is no other moment. Now is the moment.
I will stop pissing, and start peeking into it every moment of my life.
To be one with everything, you need one of everything. Now is the one of everything.
Mindfully peek into the moment where happiness resides. Always say I do to the present moment.
