Present Moment Is All You Have: Redefining Your Relationship With Time
How mindfulness improves your sense of time and why being present matters in life.
This realization was, productivity-wise (and not only), very helpful for me. Is it gaslighting yourself to make the best of a present moment? Maybe. Does it work? Hell yeah. Anyway, a short and more philosophical, flexible dive this week.
Past
False memory is a phenomenon where people recall events inaccurately or even remember things that never happened. Suggestions, stress, time, beliefs, prejudices—all contribute to this. Your mind reshapes memories—sometimes to protect your ego, sometimes to fit to the narrative you want others to see. The same is true for others; everyone bends the past in small and smaller ways.
The bottom line is: Your past is different from someone else's past.
The past is to take lessons from. Nothing more, nothing less. Nostalgia is sometimes nice, sometimes depressing, but it serves no practical purpose. Trying to bring the past to the present is a try to comfort yourself with pleasant memories. It's like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket on a cold winter night: it's comfortable and all but you have to eventually leave it.
Keep your thoughts on a leash, or they will make a mess.
Don’t let failures or painful memories weigh you down. Engrave the good moments and wins in your mind, take lessons from downs and losses and bury them. You wouldn't want to rewatch a bad movie.
"Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now." ― Eckhart Tolle
Present
The most important part.
Notice, that you can control the past in the present. Realizing that all you have is a present moment and that using it in a good way will make all future present moments better helped me immensely. I just started doing only what's good for me. It was a mindset shift I hadn't experienced in a really long time, a real game-changer.
It helped me to ease anxiety, nearly wiping it out. I just live fully in the present moment and mindfully take action to make the best of it. The best of it is defined as: I do only things that bring me closer to my goal. If you don't have a goal yet, read this.
Have you ever felt like an observer of the events in your own life, like you are going on autopilot? That means you aren’t grounded in the present moment. The past is gone, and the future depends on the present moment—that’s why it’s all you have. You wander in your mind and escape into nostalgia of the past and daydreams of the future because you want to escape the control and responsibility that is the present.
"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life." ― Eckhart Tolle
Future
Do you have a tendency to think far ahead into the future and end up getting depressed by the vision of it not going well?
Here’s the funny thing about the future: it doesn't exist yet. All there is is your projection of it, and that projection will be more or less optimistic based on fleeting factors as: how much sleep you got, what you ate, whether someone cut you off in traffic. You can't be stressed about something that hasn't happened yet if you live fully in the now.
The unavoidable challenges that are ahead of you are not there in the now, and the fact that you will have to eventually face them doesn’t change that. All actions are to be taken now. The preparation is to be made now, and if you use this now and now after this well, there are only external factors over your control that can get in your way.
I said that you can control the past in the present, you can control the future too. You can choose right now, in this present exact moment which is all you have, what action to take. Even if there's a dense fog between the action taken right now and its consequences on the other end of the tunnel, it's rare that the exit is completely invisible. You can’t cope with the future because it’s a thought, it’s not real. Does that mean you shouldn’t care about it? Of course not. The future will unfold in present moments, one after another. But as for right now, the future is nothing but a thought in your mind.
If the future will happen in the present moment too, why don’t you just do only the things that will benefit the future you.
"Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose." ― Eckhart Tolle
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Many of these thoughts were inspired by “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. If you like the concepts presented in this post, get the book here (affiliate).