Live in the Moment
Reading Time – 3 Minutes
Question
Sometimes I have so much to get done—I’m busy and I get caught up in getting the tasks done, and I completely lose the mindset to relax and feel peaceful through it all. How can I overcome that?
To overcome that, we have to live in the moment. We have to learn and practice how to be present and how to develop our awareness, so that when we’re present, we know we’re present. We have to be able to do that.
Now, if we are not able to do that, then we will live our life based on intervals of time. When we’re at work, our interval will be the start and end of the shift—clock on and clock off. If you’re a manager and you’re interviewing someone for a job, you’ll think, “I’ve got half an hour to interview this person.”
You start to see your life as a series of intervals. So when a person gets overwhelmed and gets very busy, that means they have lots of intervals to squeeze into one day. Then they’ll feel like they’re rushing around under pressure.
But the reality is there’s no such thing as intervals. Intervals are man-made. Time is man-made.
To demonstrate that time is man-made—why do we have a leap year every four years? Because there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year—and a little bit extra! They couldn’t divide it perfectly, so every four years they fix up their error, and they call it a leap year. Time is man-made.
Now, of course where there are intervals there are deadlines. And when we have too many deadlines it’ll make us sick. Why does it make us sick? Because it’s unnatural. It’s artificial. Not real. It’s like eating food which is full of preservatives—it will make you sick.
So learn how to be present. Because when you are present there’s no deadline.
Or you can say you’re pretending there are deadlines, but deep down you know there aren’t any.
Then, if you go for a job interview and they say, “We’ll let you know the outcome in a few days”—you won’t get nervous, with sweaty palms and sleepless nights, waiting. Because you know there’s no such thing as an interval of three days. There’s just this moment, the eternal now. You don’t live your life in intervals like that.
What does it look like when a person is really busy but they live in the moment?
I’ll tell you how it looks when they live in the moment. It looks like they’re engaged in all sorts of things, no different to anybody else. Their body might be moving fast if they are running late for a meeting, but inside them there’s no rush, there’s absolute calm.
What makes them different from other people is there’s no pressure in their head, there’s no deadline. So they don’t feel flat, they don’t drain their energy, they don’t worry, they don’t think. They just live in the moment. And when they live in the present moment, there’s always love and enjoyment.
In sports, when you’re able to be present they say you ‘stretch out time’. When a cricket batsman is concentrating on a ball coming at 140 km an hour from the bowler, he only has a split second before the ball reaches him. But the batsman can stretch it out so it appears to him like more than one second—by being present he sees the ball come off the bowler’s hand, he sees the seam of the ball, and he sees the twist of the ball every moment in the air as it approaches him. Everything seems so slow to him, so he is giving himself more time to respond.
So learn how to live in the moment. Don’t let ‘the present moment’ remain just a few words and theories. Learn how to apply the present moment in your life. Then your life will feel like you have all the time in the world. Your life will feel like an eternal joy.
