The present moment is your one chance to be fully alive to your experience. This is the only point from which you can foster awareness of what is happening as it is happening. Everything else is history or fantasy – some form of mental construction of past or future.
Despite the ever-available present, it is easy to overlook. Take, er, right now. What exactly is going on? As you read these words, your experience is a visual consciousness of black squiggles on a white background and the spontaneous meaning-making produced by your mind as it interprets them.
Light is reflecting off these squiggles, invisibly impressing their image on the retinas of your eyes, generating signals to your brain, and precipitating reactions, such as thoughts and feelings.
Your experience is, therefore, constantly changing – it is different, in some immeasurable way, to how it was when you started reading this paragraph.
How is this experience coming about? The fact that you are reading these words (and the fact that I wrote them) is easily taken for granted. Yet both are conditioned by a multitude of factors.
For starters, there’s your entire life story, and everything that led up to you being right here, right now, reading this.
The same goes for me, up to the point when I wrote this sentence.
Could we ever have planned or predicted this momentary encounter between ‘you’ and ‘me’?
Hallo.
Happy New Year.
