Live for the moment. Live in the Here and Now. Be fully
present in the moment.
So many ways to put it, but it all boils down to one
singular concept: the past is behind you, the future is ahead of you, and you
are never ever in either one. You can only ever be in the present.
But man, how much we try to pretend we are above that fact.
The past tells us where we came from. It defines our
earliest being, and shapes our fundamental beliefs, values, and views.
The future is the home of our hopes and goals, the horizon
before us which we travel toward all our lives.
But when we try to drag the past into the present, it does
bad things to our present and potentially worse things to our future. So
staying in the present is the safest bet really.
Of course, just as Acceptance does not mean giving up and
giving in all the time, Being Present doesn’t mean we don’t learn and embrace
the past or plan for the future. It just means leaving the tenses in their
places. Let’s start with the baggage we call The Past.
If we keep dragging the past into the present, it begins to
invade. It’s like having someone who was recently in a bad marriage plan yours.
Yes there will be good advice, but the negative things will start seeping
through, and pretty soon you find yourself thinking negatively about the Big
Step too.
You know how a bad incident in your life sticks around in
your mind? You might find yourself replaying it at times. The most common time
for a replay is when something happens that reminds you of that moment. Someone
says or does something, and poof! It’s right there in front of you.
In a relationship, you can find yourself reacting unfairly towards
the present person based on a past person.
If your previous guy
yelled at you or blamed you whenever the bank account got overdrawn, the next guy
in your life might suddenly get a defensive reaction from you over the same
incident later, even if he doesn’t really feel strongly about it.
If your previous young lady constantly vented her
frustrations on you, even if you had nothing to do with most of them, you might
find yourself dreading your next young lady’s frustrated moods simply because
you associate that with getting yelled at.
Relationships are very intimate and vulnerable times in our
lives. So when damage occurs to us in connection with them, the damage and
scars live on. Unfortunately, the scars really don’t do much to help us. Scars
don’t prevent folks from choosing to be in relationships with other people who
are not good for them. And scars tend to make us react in pre-programmed ways to
similar stimuli even when there is no like motive.
I had this problem in proverbial spades! I had experienced
so many things in my life that I did not know how to properly get distance on.
Over time I could recognize those issues approaching like watching storm clouds
roll in. And when the darkest of those clouds began to bear down on me, I
developed the strategy of heading for my mental storm shelter.
Stormy Weather!
I think that’s an appropriate analogy. See, I used to live
on a farm in Nevada, Missouri. That’s 100 miles south from Kansas City on
Missouri 71 Highway. My life changed in a jillion ways on that farm. We had
lived in Kansas City until the middle of first grade, and then we suddenly
needed to move down south where both sets of my grandparents lived. We moved into
my paternal grandparents’ home until a fire destroyed the upper level and we
had to move into a mobile home.
Let’s see, I believe that’s called foreshadowing right
there. Farm; mobile home; he’s already mentioned storms and storm cellars…..
Yes, a very hot day with no wind made that summer day pretty
miserable. In time I saw a couple of small clouds out on the horizon,
approaching out of the east. Yes, the east. In time more clouds approached,
bigger and darker. And man were they ever moving!
I went inside to tell my mom about these big black clouds
that moved faster than I could run. She was on the phone, though. So back
outside I went.
A stiff, chilly wind was blowing now. The sunshine was
piercing through waves of black clouds, such that it looked like the sky was on
fire. It didn’t take long for things to go downhill.
We got in the mobile home, while the rain and thunder and
wind competed for our attention. The trailer was a double-wide, with its wheel
frames set in concrete, but we were rocking back and forth like we were out on
a lake on a windy day. Tornado sirens were barely audible in the distance. My
mom and I struggled against wind and rain and hail to get into the root cellar,
a man-made cave covered with a concrete shell and braced aluminum doors on the
front.
That was so terrifying and so loud. By memory, there were
two funnels which crossed our farm in that storm. It was so terrifying to me
that even mild thundershowers sent me into a crying panic for a couple of weeks
afterward.
What does this have to do with being in the present moment?
A traumatic event scarred me. Afterward, I would react with
panic to triggers that were not the same thing. Yes in both cases they were
storms, but there was a world of difference between the occasional spring storm
– which I had experienced dozens of – and tornadoes. But after the trauma, in
my 7 year old mind: as soon as the thunder started clapping and the wind
started whipping, there was no difference.
Something that should have been a past memory was infecting
my present behavior without so much as asking permission. I did not leave the
past in the past. Each storm was not treated as its own thing, but as a sort of
a revisit to that traumatic time. I was not in the present moment any longer,
but in the past.
Yes it’s pretty common, and pretty normal to have reactions
like that to traumatic events. Mindfulness doesn’t teach us that it’s wrong to
react that way. It teaches us that there are other ways we can choose to react.
Healthier ways. Before we get to that, let me share a couple of defining
examples from my life of allowing the past to infect the present to the
detriment of the future.
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