January 3 2018 No. 541
Your Future in Each Here and Now
Our gut instinct or "inner child" knows best - knows best when it comes to scoping out our future and making the decisions appropriate to our getting there. But we get there one now at a time in each here and now. So, we need to ensure the right mix between our future vision and our present mind... the former guides the latter, one now at a time.
Only do today what you need to do to day - where need is defined by your heartfelt goals and objectives. This is not to say that you should be coldly and surgically focused - where's the fun, joy or flow in that? But it is to say that you need to be here now, in the zone now, focused now and having fun doing whatever you're doing now. Life is for living and living demands that we turn up to now... for all of today.
It is the 3rd of January and, no doubt, already, you have fallen in some way from the high ideals of your New Year's Resolutions. But, you know what? It doesn't matter, it is what it is. January 1st was an artificial new beginning - some kind of freaky version of what is actually happening every day... every day, every now is a new beginning.
As adults with years of experience in mindlessness, we stumble frequently. But, as a client said to me many years ago: "If I stumble twenty times today, all that means is that I have to pick myself up twenty-one times". It's not what has happened that's important - it's what happens next that is defining. And what happens next depends on what you do now... how you behave yourself now, how you come to your senses now.
Now is all that matters - your future is compromised if you're not here now, whilst your past is past. Now is where we do what we need to do to get to where we want to go. Now is where we strive, we accomplish, we win, we live, we love. Now is where we plan and visualize the future but each new now is where we do what we need to do to get to where we want to go.
Now is not some concept - it is a place and time: the only place and time that you can be. You and I must do all that we can do to enhance our ability to be present here and now. For, without that presence of mind and body, we're just wandering from one now to the next experiencing none of those nows!
We talked of a dismembered turkey - the last turkey on earth (apparently) just before Christmas. But, in France, New Year's Eve is just as important as December 25th. It's a time when families and friends gather in peace and harmony to wish each other good fortune and good health for the year ahead.
It's also a time when people literally come to blows over the last basket of oysters in the world (apparently)... for, early on New Year's Eve, I witnessed two grown men come to blows over said last basket. The result? The basket of oysters ended up on the shop floor and, in the melee, got crushed to the point of being inedible.
The most interested by-stander to this exhibibition of adulthood at its best was the guy, dressed from head to tow in a blue oilskin cape, who was delivering a fresh pallet of baskets of... yes, you've guessed it... oysters!