No one has ever revisited the past or stepped into the future. We are here, always, in this moment. Yet our thinking, our attention, is often in the past or in the future, trying to manage our experiences so that we might find greater happiness in the here and now. We are trying to rewrite yesterday to make for a better today–if only I had or hadn’t done this or that–or we are trying to plan our tomorrow so it comes out the way we think will be best.
But thinking in the past and future is not the same as being in the past and future, and no matter how well we may ‘figure things out,’ our speculating mind does nothing, ever, to change what has happened or what is going to happen; and placing our awareness in the future or the past takes us away from the only place we ever might find happiness–this present moment.
We have been trained by life and by our neurochemistry to worry about the future and feel guilty about the past. For most of us there is an automatic movement of our awareness out of the present – out of the only place where happiness might be found. By insisting on bringing our thinking back to the present moment, we become open to the happiness that is the baseline of the universe–the underlying Truth of all that is.
In this moment, right here and right now, happiness is available. We only need to step out of our thinking in order to look for it where it lives.
