Alcoholics Anonymous has a saying – “People often expect different results from doing the same actions”. 

Does the scenario of a busy executive – attending a conference call, biting into his sandwich, intermittently checking e-mails, and browsing through the latest business magazine – and doing all this simultaneously – sound familiar to you? How about a parent at home playing a game of monopoly with one child, helping another child with her homework, finishing a phone conversation, and checking on the score of a football game on TV – all at the same time?

Welcome to the world of multi-tasking!

And what’s the rush about?

There never seems time enough to fit in all our priorities – the desire to gun for the next big job at work at any cost forces us out of the lives of our children; the ambition to succeed at work and be a model parent and spouse leaves us with no time for pursuing personal interests. The result is we are preoccupied all the time – juggling between multiple tasks at the same time and mentally planning about a few others to follow. The choices thrown at us – for career, investments, leisure, education, socializing etc. – are mind numbing. The advertisers would have everyone believe that their life is always short of perfect. How well prepared are we to make the choices?

As I have briefly discussed before, we need to step back and first build clarity about the purpose of our life. What are we aiming to accomplish and why? Are we looking for money or happiness? More success or greater contribution? What’s the role of family, friends in our life? Where does the awareness about community and environment fit in? Answering some of these and related issues most important to us may be a good start to gaining clarity about the purpose of our life. As we begin to make this the anchor of our decision making, making choices suddenly becomes so much simpler – releasing wonderful chunks of time to lead an enjoyable, purposeful life.

We have an additional related challenge and that’s of our preoccupied minds. The human mind, on average, has over 50,000 thoughts in a given day – even while busy with a certain task, our mind is forever racing ahead with numerous other thoughts – thoughts of potential rewards, of missed opportunities, of what needs to happen next and so on. At a deeper level, this constant rush, the mental preoccupation, the struggle for time, is also about our deep identification with our mind. The human mind loves problems, challenges, and the adrenalin rush. Based on our childhood experiences, the mind is often conditioned to be judgmental about oneself, others, and the environment. This has a significant impact on levels of our accepting ourselves as we are and/ or accepting others as they are. The mind then makes us believe that pursuing constant action towards enhancing our state – physical, financial, social and so on – will make things better and make us look better in our own and others’ eyes. The never ending belief that once we can accomplish abc in our career, and xyz in our personal life, we will be happy and feel fulfilled. As a result, the present never seems perfect. Accordingly, we stay stuck on the thoughts around missed opportunities and regrets of the “past” and anxieties of the “future”.

“Life is what happens to us when we are busy making plans”. As we begin to disassociate ourselves from our minds, we initiate the process of living in the now; living every moment with wonder, happiness, joy and fulfillment. Try playing a witness to the wanderings of the mind – the thought patterns, the associated emotions, the physical reactions – and it starts to become clearer that we are not our minds; our true self is definitely removed from it. As we spend more moments remaining a witness, rather than being a party to the mind’s games, we begin to feel a fresh sense of internal empowerment…

Living in the now also requires surrendering to what is. As we become aware that the universe is evolving perfectly at all times, (and in the context of self-acceptance and accepting others) we need to learn to accept things the way they are. And suddenly, we can begin experiencing ourselves and the world around us to be perfect and wonderful. This acceptance requires moving our attention from living in the five senses of taste, sight, touch, smell and sound towards becoming more willing to let our lives unfold in harmony with nature and the universe. This undoubtedly is challenging and requires us to have faith in the ways of the universe – at some level, almost a suspension of disbelief in limitations of our own daily actions.

The new us is being created every moment and living in the now allows for new possibilities to emerge and be seen by us, making the present moment more joyful. Not only does living in the now allow us to automatically shape a happier future, but it also creates newer and comforting perspectives of the past.

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