Well, I'm back after a long hiatus. If you've read my blog in the past, I hope you will pick up reading again. I think it's going to be a little different now than it was. I'll still be writing about DBT skills and mindfulness, but I will also likely be writing on some other topics as well. I've kept myself in a bit of a box with this blog, so I'm going expand to some general insights I've had through my own contemplation and meditations, and who knows what else. Today, I'm going to write about right now.
Right now, this moment, is really the only thing that actually exists. The past is gone and the future is not yet with us. Right now is really all we've got, so maybe it would be helpful to pay attention to how I'm using right now. Right now is also the only time I can do anything.
I mean, I can plan to do something, and it's important to plan. But I cannot do the thing I plan until the time comes to do it. About a month ago, my wife and I took the family on vacation to Steamboat Springs, CO. I highly recommend it if you've never been there. We had to do some planning for that. Place to stay, airline tickets, possible things to do while we were there. We planned a few things before we got there. It was delightful. We went horseback riding, white water rafting, did an alpine slide. My oldest son and I went fly fishing. None of those things would have happened without some planning.
We could not do any of them until the time arrived for them. And when we did each of those things, they demanded that we get present to really experience them. It was pretty natural and easy for us to tune into those things we were doing and really experience them. Tuning into this moment gets more difficult when we are not doing things that are really enjoyable or even when we are doing things that are more mundane.
More often than I want to admit, I find myself not really tuning into the moment and instead scrolling on my phone mindlessly, or worrying about something coming up, or rehashing something that happened in the past. When we do these things, we steal an experience away from ourselves. Because this moment is the only thing that truly exists.
So, pay attention to how often your mind is here and how often it is residing somewhere else that doesn't really exist. Worry about the future and regretting the past are pasttimes that many of us engage in that don't have much helpful impact for us. Take a moment right now to pay attention to this moment. Maybe there is something delightful happening right now that you would miss otherwise.
Right now, I'm sitting on my back patio and the weather is lovely. It's early evening and I hear birds and insects, and one of my dogs is wandering around the yard. I hear the delighted squeals of children swimming in a neighbor's pool. And I probably would have missed all of that if I did not take a moment to pay attention to the loveliness of this moment right here.
I hope the moments that you decide to pay attention to provide you with some loveliness as well.
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