Page 148: NOW, Just in Time

When I was a child, the only moment I ever paid attention to was the one I was in...I was eight years old for a lifetime. I was nine years old for a lifetime. I turned ten, and that year lasted a lifetime, too.

But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year. When I hear people say that time moves faster as you get older, I think they have it wrong. It's not that time moves any faster; it's that it collapses altogether.

-- Dr. Youngme Moon, Harvard Business School, Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

One of the most valuable lessons I ever learned came from Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. In it, he skillfully articulates the dangers of living in the past - thinking about it, longing for it, or regretting it - as well as the folly of living for the future: worrying about it, fearing it, or just obsessing over it. If you want to maximize your happiness, Tolle argues, "live in the now." The thought is profound. The notion is very close to a foundational thought from Buddhism, that most human worry, or "suffering" as articulated there, comes from our tendency to want to hold on to the present, to make it last. We don't want things to change and experience worry and fear about the future and the changes it might bring.

But change is inevitable. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "you can never step in the same river twice." The water flowing in the river is constantly moving, swirling, and changing.

Thirty years ago, Philip Brickman studied lottery winners and happiness. He found that while winners were elated at first, afterwards they were no happier than they had been prior to winning. Brickman coined the phrase "hedonistic treadmill" to describe our tendency to set new baselines in life. We humans have a remarkable ability to feel entitled today to what we were so excited about and thankful for yesterday.


What I make out of it is this:

Visit the past to remember valuable lessons and great memories. Don't obsess about the past or it will own you and your future.  Plan for the future, but never obsess over it. To do so wastes valuable time in the now. You'll live so many days worrying about the future, you'll sacrifice the present.

Embrace the inevitable change in life. Kids grow up. Parents age. Find the beauty in the Now and when you let go of anxieties about Past & Future, the Now becomes a much brighter, happier place. Live each day finding the good things in life that over-shadow the bad. The light side of life is always brighter. Always.


I had the pleasure of hearing Don Miguel Ruiz when he was in Austin a couple of years ago. Don is the bestselling author of the The Four Agreements and a modern day philosopher descended from a centuries-old line of ancient Toltec shamans. He is respected around the world as a thinker and modern day mystic philosopher. He said it best:

“Life is like dancing. If we have a big floor, many people will dance. Some will get angry when the rhythm changes. But life is changing all the time... The best path to happiness is learning to change as rapidly as life does."