“Forever is composed of nows.”

Emily Dickinson

Where are you right now? At this very moment.

You might say you’re reading an article on your phone or computer. You might say you’re physically in a certain room or on a bus or at a café. All right, next question: where is your mind?

Is it here in this moment? Or is it lightyears away? Is it pondering tomorrow, or next year, or ten years ago? Is it worrying over a to-do list? Is it planning the next step?

Forethought and rumination are crucial, but I think we take them too far. At times when we should be focused on where we are, our minds are already ten steps ahead or a thousand steps back. We miss the present moment—and the present is all we have.

To echo Arnold Bennett’s illuminating reflection on living in the time we have, we cannot draw on the future or the past. We can only ever use the present. We can’t waste tomorrow, but we often waste today.

Seneca, one of the great stoic philosophers, weighed in heavily on the shortness of life and humanity’s endless proficiency at wasting it on fruitless endeavors:

“Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied with doing nothing.” — Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Life is short as it is, and compared to the era in which that quote was penned, life has become even easier to whittle away in fruitless worry and empty busyness.

We have no lack of technology, information, and entertainment.

We have a severe deficit in being wherever we are.

I notice this in my own life. All too often, when I’m out doing something I looked forward to — a concert, a trip, or a festival — my mind makes no delays in jumping forward to the future or fretting about the past. One moment, I’m enjoying the present, and the next, I’m hijacked on a train of thought about tomorrow’s to-do list or a mistake I made years ago. Worried about what is to come. Worried about what happened. What ifs galore!

Even though I notice it and pull myself back into the moment, I nonetheless lose pieces of life to fruitless rumination, because most of these thoughts are not original at all, but repeats of things I already know. And how often do I have to repeatedly pull myself back from those tangents? Countless times! The mind can be as unruly as it is powerful.

This is a common malady, even more so when it comes to pleasures. When we seek out something and then achieve it, how long does the pleasure last? How long before our mind switches on to the next shiny thing? Today, you are looking forward to the thing you get to do tomorrow, yet tomorrow, while doing that very thing, your mind is already distracted by what comes next.

“They dash from one pleasure to another and cannot stay steady in one desire.” — Seneca

Dashing indeed. Always moving, never realizing that they are losing the only thing they truly possess: this very moment.

Instead of bouncing from preoccupation to preoccupation, we must learn to inhabit each moment that comes. The good ones and the bad ones, because without presence, we lose so much of our power. Most of all, the less we live in the moment, the less we live.

The future is not yet alive.

The past is as dead as stone.

Only the present bears the seeds of cultivation.

So today, ground yourself in the moment, especially the ones you’ve been looking forward to.

Are you going to a concert? A party? A walk? A trip abroad? Or just sitting down and enjoying a movie you’ve been meaning to watch? Whatever it is, be there. Shut off tomorrow. Shut off yesterday. Please, for the love of god, shut off your phone. Lest we end up like those poor people who can never find peace at all, wasting their lives in unchecked desire and fear. Those who, as Seneca wrote ages ago, “Lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.”

It’s a comfort to arrive at the end of life with a trove of precious moments to validate your journey. To say, “This is how I lived.”

It’s a tragedy to arrive at the end to realize you let them slip through your fingers. That you lived only a fraction of your life.

The answer to this problem? You, where you are, in this very moment. Nothing can take that away from you but yourself.

(Originally published on Publishous)