The Present

Much like most of us tend to ignore the past and push it away as if it is an anchor weighing us down, we all seem to lose touch with the here and now and forget that this is living right now, this very spot.

I don’t mean to pick on my parents, but sometimes parental guidance is the classic example of forgetting the here and now. I do not mean that they have forgotten what it’s like to be my age, or go through what I have, no I think they no clearly what it is, but they like all parents have their wisdom from these times and want you to realize that there is more to life after this. I can calmly remember many a time when either my Mom or Dad would use the phrase “You have to plan for the future”. Now I don’t want to give away too much into what would be my third piece on the future, but by planning for the future, sometimes we forget that here and now is all we really have. I know I have not quite taken my parents advice to heart, sometimes met with disaster, other times, a pleasant surprise; after all I am in Japan. What I mean by this is I see too many friends in University no matter what level focusing on fulfilling their ambition of getting to the next level. While I have no trouble with people reaching for the stars, cause lord help me I know I do. I just see some many things these people are missing out on. Now while others may argue they are not missing out on much, being that they have experienced them and found in the end that they did not lead anywhere, maybe that’s the point. To experience it so you know why it’s exists, even if it leads to nothing.

I see the present as how we should live, yes reach for your goals, but if you can’t experience life now, if you keep holding yourself back waiting for certain things to fall so that you can “start living” then you will have missed so much. Imagine if you will all the things that you have seen and done, on a whim, sometimes giving the best results, sometimes proving nothing more than a distraction from your present course. Now imagine if you were to sit at a lunch table listening to people converse about how they got there, their past, and how you kept putting off your present for a future ambition. Your current status would be “waiting for something better” but how long can you go waiting, without living. I mean there are people who are bound and determined to get where they need to be in order to fulfill what they see as their destiny; but what if you forget to look at the road your taking, how can you know your best course if you don’t explore a little. The past as I said brought us this far, it shaped us to look at the world around us as we see it, but maybe the present offers not only that view, but a completely new view, one that is only focused on the here and now, the moment that we have.

I don’t mean to take away from plans while I personally relied on goals rather than plans. I mean to say that people should focus on the world around them right now; they might get a better sense of how they need to get to where they want to, or if getting there is really what they want. Life is not about waiting for the perfect moments, it’s the combination of life’s imperfections jumbled into one bright and blurring memory. But how can you say you lived life without seeing this imperfections along the way, if all you have is a start and end, and no middle, it’s like any good piece of work, you need something to fill it out, and that is why we live, in the present, not the past or the future. We are here living now, only have one shot at this as far as I know, so make the best of it.

It does not do well to dwell in the past or examine the future, if you forget to live now.

The wind does not remember the past or look to the future, it knows only now