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“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

Evelyn Waugh

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Ok. Sometimes when people suggest ‘live in the now’ I think they are a little flippant and possibly naïve.

I say this as a person who recognizes that if you manage the ‘now’ well, uhm, pretty much everything else, especially the future, will take care of itself.

Regardless. The reason why I think these fortune cookie philosophers are a little naïve is that it ignores the fact that most people get squeezed not really by the grind or ‘to do list’, but rather mentally by the past & the future.

flower small in handYou just get squeezed in your head which basically clutters up your head so much the present seems infinitely small.

Well.

Unfortunately.

The present is small.

It just gets even smaller when squeezed by past and future. And then you start trying to cram in all the tangible shit you need to do <as well as the things you don’t really need to do but have convinced yourself it is ‘need’>.

Holy shit.

This means “don’t blink” because if you do the present has completely disappeared. While it makes my head hurt just typing this there is a reason I bring it up.

While I have written ad nausea about managing time in general and how we focus on the wrong shit <spending more time making lists than actually doing shit> I would suggest that if you want to manage your time more effectively you need to get your head out of the ‘past & future’ head game. If you do that effectively than you have effectively given yourself at east a chance <no guarantee> you will effectively maximize your present time.

I am not suggesting this will make living in the now any easier, but it will certainly declutter your present increasing the likelihood you may actually be able to not only maximize your present tangibly … but also emotionally.

Maximizing your present, the “now”, is hard. Fucking hard. Anyone who suggests it is easy or ‘you should try and do it more’ is … well … fucking crazy.

Reality?

You get squeezed by time <shit to do crammed into a smaller bag of time>.

You get squeezed by head <past & future>.

You get squeezed by heart <what I would love to do … or family … or …>.

now is our timeYou get squeezed by wallet <I gotta pay the bills for god’s sake!>.

Therefore, unsqueezing at least something makes it better.

If you can unsqueeze from between past and future, that seems like the easiest and smartest one to attempt.

But, hey, that’s me.

The present is a pretty cluttered moment for everyone. And decluttering the present is incredibly hard — for everyone. I imagine my point is if you cannot figure out a way of decluttering your present you will have absolutely zero, nada, zilch chance of living in the “now” and, maybe worse, you will never even be able to recognize the present from the past or the future – it will all get squeezed into one small moment after another small moment of ‘nothingness‘ crammed with a lot of ‘somethings.’ 

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Written by Bruce