you never have to deal with more than one moment.

This is a pretty long article, but definitely one VERY worth reading. It really made me stop, breathe, and learn to take each moment at a time instead of giving into the hustle and bustle of all the stresses life brings, especially amidst finals and college life.

If you read Raptitude you’ll see me talk a lot about moments.  By the end of this post you’ll understand why I use that word so much.  I grew up thinking the word moment referred to specific instants in time, usually where some significant event occurred.  There were historic moments, life-changing moments, poignant moments, tense moments, touching moments, Kodak moments. They were events to be remembered, reminisced about, or photographed. 

Whatever they were, they held you captive.  Everything else seemed to drop away, and you just watched.  They seemed to be isolated from the normal, linear course of time. 

As for the rest of life, it just seemed to be the normal, steady current of ‘stuff.’  Some fun, some pain, some hope, some confusion, some excitement, some tedium.  Same same but different. 

When I was twenty, desperately leafing through some forgotten self-help book, I came across a peculiar line.  It didn’t astound me at the time, but it still stuck in my head.  It kept appearing in my thoughts.  I think I detected a hint of its significance, but it was years before I fully appreciated how powerful it is.  Now I believe it is the most important thing I ever learned: 

Life unfolds only in moments. 

Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t a moment in action.  And all those moments have had one thing in common, they were all now once. 

So if you think about it, you may picture life as a whole stack of moments, like a stack of photographs that show what happens in your life instant by instant.  The present moment sits at the top, and past moments extend down from there.  New moments drop from above, as the seconds tick by.  That stack of moments is your life.  Right? 

Well, not really.  There is no stack.  If there were, you could just lift a photo out of the middle and it would be as clear and vivid as the one on top.  You could sift through your past at will, and see every detail just as if it were happening again.  You could pick a moment from way down in the stack, maybe your fifth birthday, and recall every detail. 

I remember parts of my fifth birthday, I think.  My mom actually made us cupcakes instead of a cake that year, one for each kid.  My guests’ cupcakes each had one candle, except mine had five because I was the birthday boy.  Of that I’m certain, but I sure couldn’t tell you what I was wearing, or list all the kids who were there.  I’ve got one or two details rattling around in my memory, but the moment itself is gone. 

Of course I have memories, but they are poor facsimiles of the moment they are supposed to represent.  Those memories are not a part of that moment.  They’re a part of this one, right now, where I’m sitting in front of my computer on the evening of April 1, 2009.  They are not a part of October 8th, 1985.  Even memories can only happen now. 

I cannot access my fifth birthday in any way; I’m stuck here.  Now. 

There’s really only one picture, but it keeps changing.  We can remember when it looked different, but we can’t see its past incarnations with anywhere near the clarity we can with the present one. 

So my fifth birthday is as dead as Ben Franklin. This sounds kind of sad, but it’s actually fantastic news. 

If the scope of life never extends beyond one moment, that means you never have to deal with more than one moment. You can bring all your attention and resources to bear on making the smartest move right now; there needn’t be any other considerations.  This means that there are not a million things to do, or a million people to please.  All you ever have to do is observe the moment that is happening, and pick an action that makes sense to you.
It often doesn’t seem like it, but life is always presented in these convenient, manageable slices.  The scope of your power as a person cannot extend beyond this single moving snapshot, so there is no reason to attempt to influence anything beyond it.  Observe the moment, pick what strikes you as a smart move, do it and watch what happens.  That’s the only responsibility you ever need to live up to.  It encompasses everything you can possibly do in life, so don’t kill yourself trying to reach further than that. 

You do not have to figure out your future, or come to terms with your past, because there is no future or past.  Any experiences that seem to be from the past or future are not experiences at all, they are just thoughts.  Those thoughts are all just features of the present moment. 

Try this: 

Hold your hands up, palms facing each other, one beside each ear.  Feel the heat radiating from your head, and get a sense of how small the space is between your hands.  It’s not much bigger than a basketball. 

Every single thing you’ve ever experienced, every sour memory, every embarrassment, every triumph, every great fear and every great hope, is confined within the space between your hands.  All conceptions or visions of your past and future are right there floating above your neck, and they cannot be found anywhere else.  They have no weight of their own, no permanence.  They can take no form other than that of a fleeting thought. 

Rather than experiences, thoughts are more akin to a sudden noise: they arise with a frightful clatter, and are just as suddenly gone, leaving no trace.  Unfortunately, the human mind has some inefficiencies.  The mind doesn’t automatically make a distinction between experiences and thoughts about experiences, regardless of whether those experiences are remembered, anticipated, or imagined. 

If they are mistaken for the actual experiences they represent, the person thinking them can react as such, with the same physical and emotional distress they might have if they were actually experiencing them. These physical responses can trigger other thoughts, and the subsequent torrent of ‘noise’ can take on the appearance of a whole lifetime of regrets and worries. They are still insubstantial thoughts, but the physical and emotional reactions they trigger are concrete and real. Simply recognizing thoughts as the phantom ruses they are can halt this process before it happens. 

Neither the future nor the past can ever be dealt with, and they don’t need to be. You only need to deal with your present-moment thoughts about them.  When you are not having thoughts about those two realms of time, they bear zero relevance to your life.  You can safely let them go and feel free to deal with the living moment at hand. 

This truth, once I fully understood it, released a huge weight from around my neck.  Life wasn’t crushing and heavy, it was as light as air.  Thin as a photograph.  I was finally able to look into each moment as if it were nothing more than an infinitely detailed and poignant living picture.  I could finally take the moments one at a time, because I understood that there never was more than one.  I could appreciate and observe each one, and know that my whole life lies within it, not just a tiny fraction.  There are no ghastly fears out there, stalking me from somewhere else, waiting to pounce.  If they existed, they’d be right here, in the picture for me to look at with the rest of the scenery.  Moments do hold me captive, and everything else does drop away. But they aren’t few and far between, they’re broadcast live, 24-7. 

Moments can be observed with clarity, and can be navigated deftly, but our whole lives are just too vast to be managed at all, no matter how strong or organized we become.  The crushing weight of one’s entire past is always too much to bear, as is the frightful spectre of another forty or fifty years rife with dilemmas and tragedies.  It’s far too complex; there are too many contingencies and unknowns.  Surely something in there will overwhelm or destroy us. 

A human being just can’t deal with that, and often it feels like the best we can do is distract ourselves from it.  But we don’t need to. 

We just have to recognize that there is no ‘out there’ at all.  Life is in right front of you, all of it, always.  And there isn’t any more to it.

don't compare yourself to anyone.

One of the unfortunate tendencies of our humanity is comparing ourselves to each other. We’ve been doing it since we were little kids. “My dad is stronger than yours.” “My house is bigger than yours.” It continues into our teenage years and the category of comparison grow. We compare our looks, our talents, our academic achievements, our friendships, our relationships or lack thereof. The list goes on. 

In our adulthood, I do not think we become any wiser – our measuring stick continues to be the people around us. With the prevalence of social media, I can only imagine that the urge to compare one’s life to the depiction of others’ lives on social media platforms is greater for many of us. Images and expressions from people seemingly to be living only the good life can leave one despaired as to why your life isn’t as good as everybody else’s. Of course the reality that most people won’t tell you is that this portrayal of the good life is only partial, which is just one of many reasons that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others. 

I think many of us are fond of telling each other only the good parts of our lives. It is one of the ways in which life is a performance. But the reality of everyone’s life is that we all have to endure pain in one way or the other. Of course, no one likes to bring that up when they run into their friends at parties. We smile and we laugh and we tell you that life is wonderful or at least alright, even when we might be dying inside, even when we feel like our lives are completely falling apart. If you are perceptive, you know that no matter how wonderful life is, even when life’s struggles are beautiful, this life that is a gift is still a life full of problems. 

The truth is most of us don’t know what each other have negotiated to be where we are in our lives. Take the example of romantic relationships. People often ask me if I ever get lonely or feel left out in comparison to my friends who are in relationships. The truth is sometimes I do – whenever I have to go to an event by myself or bring a girlfriend or guy friend to something that should ordinarily be for couples, of course I feel left out. But the truth is I have learned not to envy people in relationships because I do not know how truly happy they are; I don’t know what they endure every day on account of having a significant other, and I do not know what they have sacrificed to be in that relationship. 

Another great category of comparison is in career. As someone who has always been very diligent about school and work experience, my peers were very surprised that post-college, after failing to go to law school, I worked at a struggling start-up for a year. It didn’t pay much so I was not a high-earning graduate like people suspected I would be. But I liked my job even though it didn’t always give me the monetary satisfaction that many of my friends enjoyed. One of my friends who had landed an amazing job at a top accounting firm one day told me he envied me. I was really surprised because I envied his life. He had moved to L.A., he was a high-earning graduate, and he seemed to be living the good life. He said he envied the freedom and happiness I enjoyed in my job. To him, I was living the good life even though my life was far from it. 

It’s okay to want things other people have; it is quite natural and we should want good things for ourselves. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that other people have picture-perfect lives. Everyone struggles, everyone hurts, and everyone is enduring something that they probably won’t tell you about. Whatever picture people paint their life as, rest assured that any one life in all its parts is beautiful and dark, hopeful and weary, a blessing and an everyday battle. Focus on the good parts of your life and be grateful for your own set of problems because if you knew what everyone else was going through, you would probably still choose your own life. Don’t compare yourself to anyone and while we’re at it, let’s be a little kinder to each other along the way.

thought catalog. 

become aware of a silent but powerful sense of presence.

“Incredible change happens in your life

 when you decide to take control of 

what you do have power over instead of 

craving control over what you don't.”

When I read this quote, it really struck me.  In life, so many things happen every day that we simply can't control.  People (including me) spend way too much time trying to control these unavoidable events, using up all their energy on something that won't ever change.  This causes people to feel discouraged and unsatisfied with their life.  This could all change if we spent less time on this and more time on acknowledging that a situation may not be ideal, but that we are strong enough to accept it and move on.  Of course this can be very very difficult, especially if it's something like a family illness or a death, but it's necessary if you want to fully live your life without letting the event consume you.

I think another thing I overlook a lot is that I CAN control what I focus on and what I make my priorities in my day to day life.  I tend to become frustrated with people who don't make an effort to keep up their friendship with me.  I spend way too much energy trying to keep it alive when maybe, right now it's just not meant to be.  Instead of doing this, I could easily be focusing on the amazing friendships I do have and wholeheartedly appreciating them more.

Also, I tend to make my priorities things that really do not matter in the long run.  I too often become so preoccupied with the hustle and bustle of mindlessly studying all week and going out all weekend that I don't stop, take a breath, and realize what's truly important.  I refuse to go through the motions of life, so I'm definitely going to challenge myself to take more time to reflect, slow down, and go after what has real value in my life, like my relationships with friends, family, God, and myself.