Are you a participant in your life or a bystander?
Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a
while, you could miss it
~ Ferris Bueller
Another week and the year seems to be flying by, mid May already (is it meant to be warm by now?) Life can whizz by us if we aren’t paying attention and for the last few years a lot of people seem to feel the year is passing by quicker that the allotted 365 days. Some years it really does seem to feel that we are getting cheated out of a couple of months. Is this because in these ‘modern times’ we spend a lot of our time rushing from one thing to the next and spending a great deal of our day living in the future? We are so preoccupied with clock watching and planning what should be done tomorrow or next week that we forget to live today – which is what we were planning yesterday. Life can seem pretty strange if we never really live in the now. It’s like standing on the side of the highway and just watching all the cars speed by, never getting to examine more closely a make or model you really like because you are watching out for the next one in case it’s better or more important than the previous. If you lived life like that then it would be fairly boring day after day, yet that is what a lot of us do.
It’s easy to get caught up in rushing around feeling busy and yet at the same time not really feeling that we accomplish anything towards our goals or be of use. Then when we do stop and pause for a moment collecting our thoughts, we see where we are and become a bit dejected because we think the amount of effort and time we put into something just doesn’t seem to correspond with the level of accomplishment.
By focusing solely on a particular task and giving that task our all we are being present in that moment and become fully aware of what it has to offer us and what we have to offer it. We therefore utilise the time wisely and because we are focused and committed we are not distracted by other future or past thoughts. We live the moment and not just realise later that is has passed us by; we feel the hours of the day because we are living them and are part of them. We become a participant in our own time and not just a bystander on the peripheral of it constantly watching and planning for a life we never truly live.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting
June 15th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Hi, interesting post. I’ll write you later with a few questions