Think

This morning I woke up to lightly falling snow outside my bedroom window. My garden, now dormant with the chill of winter, looked so untouched, so peaceful under its current blanket of snow, all other thoughts (my mental to-do list) were forgotten at that moment. This was yet another example of an axiom I've learned to make a big part of my life's philosophy... to focus on the present moment. I suppose you could say that I was communing with nature, and that's true, but it was more than that...

I was fixated by the flakes, falling indiscriminately in a slight whirlwind but all coming together to cover not only my entire yard, but the streets, the parked cars...everything in its path... and so quietly, so calmly, not a raging blizzard that makes us wince when its winds hurl themselves against our windows, but like an animated Currier and Ives winter landscape. Best of all, at that moment I wasn’t thinking about anything else! No thoughts of the past interrupted my joy and wonder at nature at work, and no worries of future calamities took hold in my head.

In essence, I was fully in the moment, and it was an amazingly grounded feeling. I've discovered that when I'm able to stay in the present (the here and now, with no anxieties about past events or trepidations about the future) I feel more calm, more relaxed, more at ease. Even though there are certainly still things in my life that are far from perfect, in those moments, those issues or anxieties don’t seem as important and I don't dwell on them.

When we're upset and worried, our thoughts can become preoccupied with bothersome incidents, or we can find ourselves fretting about things which we have little or no control over... I call that "thinking in circles," wasting mental energy on things that, like it or not, we'll never be able to change. I would nip those thoughts in the bud at times when you should be revelling in the here and now. So, take a few moments today to just enjoy the state of being. Try it and see how you feel!