14 May Don’t spend your life preparing for life
Life is meant to be lived NOW. Life can only be lived NOW.
Happiness is in the moment; sure, we can plan for and look forward to things. And this is important. But experiencing the positive emotion of happiness can only really be done here and now.
So stop “getting ready”. Stop waiting for happiness. Take it with both hands NOW and start fully living…
via the Ladders by Thomas Oppong
Life is too short if you spend it meaningfully and do what gives you a sense of accomplishment.
Life is too long if you spend all your time worrying about the unpredictable future or the regrets of the past.
You know it. Everyone knows it.
But strangely enough, only a few people consciously choose to live in the present every day.
The future can provide hope, and the past can provide closure but focusing on either one obsessively, however, quickly becomes deteriorating to your mental and emotional health.
What you exchange even an hour of your day for matters in life.
Charles Darwin once said, “A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.”
You can be busy all your life without ever doing something meaningful.
Your ability to appreciate life can never be taken from you, so beware of the distractions of life and purposefully use your time wisely.
In her collection of short essays, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard explains:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Life unfolding, but we are too occupied to notice.
We are too busy worried about the past and the future that we let the present slip away, allowing time to rush past unobserved and unseized.
We squander to our precious seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years as we worry about the future and ruminate about what’s past.
“Perhaps most simply stated, worrying is a behavior that steals joy, affecting sleep and decision making. It’s understandable to feel more overwhelmed when facing new situations but there are simple ways to contain worry to live a more fulfilled life,” says Dr. Simon A. Rego, a cognitive behavioral psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders.
You can only live one moment at a time, choose to live in the moment…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE