living in the moment

“This tsunami of emotion never gives you adequate warning. Of course it doesn’t. It waits until your back is turned…until you are sure that you have everything that you could possibly want or need and then, oh yes then it crashes over you with an unstoppable force; ripping your feet out from under you and washing you away on a tide of passion; out to an uncharted sea of possibilities.” ~ SSHenry

Have you ever stood in the ocean; pants rolled up above your knees; feeling the pull of the tide around your legs; the way it tugs the sand out from under your feet throwing you more and more off balance every time the wave carves deeper beneath you?

But you aren’t afraid. Not yet. Not so long as you are only up to your calves in water; not so long as you can manage to stay upright. And you’re balancing! Yes, it’s not as hard as you at first thought. Yes, having the ground pulled out a bit from beneath your feet can be a bit disconcerting, but it’s really not bad once you get used to it; once you learn how to regain your balance.

It’s sort of like life, isn’t it? There is always something coming at you; a wave of emotion; of drama of issues and griefs and sometimes joys. Each of them tugs at you; pulls at you; begs you to come “just a little bit deeper” or to adjust your footing to compensate.

It’s that siren song; the sea pulling you into its depths and soothing your fears and calling you home; calling you to surrender to the inevitable. But you’ve got this. There is a rhythm here; if you can feel it you can remain upright and in control.

And then comes the rogue wave; the tsunami of emotion; that unexpected and (most times) unwanted tidal wave of passion that surges over you and through you and turns your entire world upside down.

This tsunami of emotion never gives you adequate warning. Of course it doesn’t. It waits until your back is turned; until you are sure that you are stable and steady; that you have everything that you could possibly want or need and then, oh yes then it crashes over you with an unstoppable force; ripping your feet out from under you and washing you away on a tide of passion; out to an uncharted sea of possibilities.

You can’t fight it.

Well, let me rephrase that. You can fight it, but nothing you can do will stop it and the most you can hope for is to keep your head above water and to ride it out until the surge passes and you find yourself out in unexplored waters where even the powerful beams from the light houses of logic and reason simply cannot reach.

When you open your eyes at last and find yourself adrift on waters strewn with the wreckage of what you once thought was a stable life (that once upon a time world where the lifeguards of logic patrol the shores and keep a person from getting too far over their head), and find yourself beyond any visible shore, you have two choices:

You can either let yourself drown in despair over what you have lost, or you can lie back and let the current take you where it will and trust that the shore it brings you too will far exceed even your absolute wildest dreams.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. ~Buddha

When I first heard the phrase “living in the moment” I found myself laughing sadly and shaking my head at the gullible fools who would buy into something so inane. Live in the moment? What fool would settle for living in the moment? Man oh man, talk about boring!

I didn’t want to live in the moment. What I wanted was to live my dreams, to achieve my goals; to make something of myself so that when I died the world would remember me! Forget about this living in the moment stuff. Obviously it was a cop out by those who hadn’t done anything with their lives; people who perhaps had once dreamed big but who had failed to follow through and were now regretting it; something to fall back on in order to make themselves feel better.

I knew better. I knew that if you wanted to be anything in life; if you wanted to make something of yourself, you had to remain in control; not only of yourself but of everyone and everything around you. Leaving anything up to chance was just plain foolishness.

If you wanted to get anywhere in life you needed to focus on your goals and break your projects down into small steps that you could accomplish and then, when all of the steps were completed, presto, your goal would be achieved. Well, that was the plan. And hey, it worked for businesses, why not for me?

There was just one problem. The goals that I had set for myself were not in alignment with my soul purpose. Hell, I didn’t even know what my soul purpose was. I had created a nice neat fiction for my life; a belief that when I attained a specific level of financial security or professional achievement that I would, at last, be happy. Well, that was the plan anyway.

And so it was that even when I had achieved each goal there was always something missing. It was like baking a cake. I’d followed the steps – added all of the ingredients in the proper order – and had a perfect cake sitting in front of me, but even though it looked perfect, it didn’t taste quite right. What had I done wrong?

Over time, however, I have discovered something; I found out what was missing, and it was far simpler than I could have imagined and all the more difficult because of that to implement. What I was missing was living (dare I say it?) in the moment; enjoying what I had already achieved without the expectation of what came next; of what I could do better next time around.

For all of my lists and my schedules; for all of my hopes and dreams and plans; for all of my visualization and projection; without being able to step aside and get out of my own way I ended up with a picture perfect cake that had little if any flavor.

This isn’t to say that we can’t dream.

This isn’t to say that visualization will not bring you your heart’s desire.

All this means is that we need to take the time – right now – to enjoy the moment that we spent all of our yesterday’s dreaming of and visualizing. It is the enjoyment of the moment that we have created that brings us the flavor of our days. And it is here, in the quiet of appreciation and the letting go of expectation where we will find that happiness has been waiting patiently for us all along.

Living In The Moment

To take each day as it comes

To live each moment as it arrives

To hope for nothing

To fear nothing

To expect nothing

Makes each moment a priceless gift;

A gift from the universe

Straight to your heart

A gift to be treasured and adored

A gift to be enjoyed, experienced

And then released.