I don’t know who first coined the expression “live in the moment” but I do know that I always found the phrase irritating. I mean, where else is a person going to live?
Short of time travel, there wasn’t much choice. Turns out I was wrong. It happens from time to time.
While it’s true our body can only live in the moment, our mind is another matter. I was amazed to discover that despite spending a lifetime with my mind, I had been clueless as to where it resided for so many years.
In the morning my mind lived in the future. I would leap out of bed with scarcely a glance at the sunrise or an ear for birdsong.
Instead my mind was throwing the first load of laundry into the machine before my feet hit the floor. Then I was on to school lunches, waking up the boys, making breakfast, feeding the dogs and doing the farm chores –all of this while my body was still in the shower.
While the kids were heading out the door to catch the bus my mind was already pulling into the parking lot at the end of the day to pick them up from various after school activities and figuring out what time I would have to finish work to make it happen.
On the drive to town my body was behind the steering wheel but my mind was careening up and down the aisles of the grocery store trying to figure out what to make for supper.
It wasn’t uncommon to reach town with only the barest recollection of how I got there. Not a safe situation for my body, or for those around me.
The only time my mind wasn’t in the future was when I fell into bed at night. That was when it went traipsing off to visit the past. I would replay all the things I wished I had done differently over the day.
If I exhausted recent material then I would go over things that had happened weeks, months or even years before.
Then there was my date with worry. We met up for a chat almost every morning around 4 am. My eyes would pop open in the dark and there worry would be, sipping coffee, tapping fingers, glancing at its watch, wondering where I’d been.
This was bounce time.
Worry and I would ricochet from the past to the future with the most common theme being how something I did or didn’t do in the past would affect the future of my loved ones in horrible ways. A tight ball of anxiety would form in my gut, but instead of drop kicking it to the curb I would nurse it along until it was a big raging orb of fury. Worry became my baby. The thing I nurtured.
Then one day my body was taking the dog for a walk while my mind was off sorting out the lives of all the people I cared about and some I barely knew when this voice in my head suddenly said “Pay attention!”
I know that sounds pretty crazy, but that’s what happened. I figured there must be a vehicle behind me and it was my subconscious cluing me in. But the road was empty.
Then I thought there must be a bear about to eat me. But there was no bear.
So I listened to the voice and I paid attention.
It was one of those beautiful summer days with a deep blue sky and not a cloud from rim to rim. Pink wild roses perfumed the air and I spotted a robin hopping along the ditch, ear cocked to the ground. A squirrel chattered from the limb of huge diamond willow that was draped over a fence with such artistry I felt like I had stepped inside a painting.
And that’s when I understood what living in the moment meant. And that’s when I realized, to my eternal regret, that I never had.
But the great thing about choosing — or in my case being told — to live in the moment is that regrets live in the past. And you can’t live in the past when you’re living in the moment; so no regrets.
There’s a wise saying about our battle between worry and peace, love and anger or resentment and forgiveness. The emotion that will triumph is the one you choose to feed.
The same thinking applies to living in the moment. My mind still wanders from the present, but when it does I gently say, “And I’m back.” Sort of like a television host after a commercial break. The goal is to eventually be commercial free.
It’s not easy to change a lifetime of thinking, but nothing worth having is easy. And living in the moment is worth having. If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, you could do worse.
Shannon McKinnon is a humour columnist from the Peace River country. You can read more of her writing at www.shannonmckinnon.com