Where Will I Live?

I climbed out of bed a little while ago and didn't think about much of anything as I poured a cup of coffee and grabbed what I needed for my morning meditation. But by the time I sat down in my chair on the front porch, I was thinking about everything. I didn't wait long before I began spinning my wheels and making my lists, I need to get this done today, I need to get that done today, I need to help do this, I want to do that, and so on until I felt the weight of a day that had not yet gotten out of the starting blocks begin to crush me down.

What utter foolishness. No matter how much I have or want to do today, I can only do one thing at a time. I can multitask some things, but the fact is that at any one moment I can only concentrate and focus on one thing an instant. If I am focusing on the future, even just a few hours ahead, I can not ever truly concentrate on the present. And that means I am not fully experiencing this moment that God has given me.

I put the distractions of the hours to come away and set my mind to the now need of spending time with my Creator. After all, I can not do anything else that I need to do or want to do with the right attitude, reacting the right way (or not reacting at all), I can not know which direction to turn or what priority and time should be placed on what demand for my time in a way that can be safely trusted if I am not connected to the Safely Trusted One.

I pushed the other aside and made my opening prayers. Then I sat for a moment. It suddenly occurred to me that the temperature felt quite nice this morning. I noticed that birds were singing a beautiful song and had been. The squirrels and the cats are playing and teasing each other in the yard, the love God has given me is sitting beside me, and life in this moment is good. But to see that I had to get into this moment. I always exist in the now, but where I live is often a different matter. But in order to enjoy life, I must experience it, and in order to experience life I must be where it is mentally, spiritually and emotionally as well as physically. Life exists in one place and one place only. In one instant. There is no life in the past. The past is dead. There is no life yet in what is to come. But in the very essence of the moment, in now, is every heartbeat of life. I will try today to keep this in mind and enjoy each moment, do what I need to be doing at the moment I need to be doing it, and do enough next right things that the future doesn't catch me by surprise but also doesn't rob me of living in the present.