Making the Very Most of Now

WE TAKE A LOT FOR GRANTED. It’s just our simple human nature. It’s only when things change irrevocably that we even take time to consider what we’ve lost.

‘Now’ is a concept beyond us somehow. We feel like we’d like to incarcerate some of these ‘now’ moments—to relive them at will, whilst many other less bliss-filled moments we hope will skip on so better life can soon be enjoyed. Gee, we’re hard to please. But this is not criticism of the way we live life.

When life takes a turn unpredictably and we’re left open-jawed we begin to reminisce, finally, over what we’ve just lost. And this continues, more or less, through our more pained days.

Hidden Blessings

Making the most of now is simply about understanding that life could get worse than it is currently, and we have now—plain, as it is—to enjoy and appreciate, and that’s all.

We may even have valid reasons for not enjoying the moment we’re in, but it’s truly incumbent on us to try and see the generous portions of blessing we’re presently engaged with.

There are hidden blessings everywhere, even in the most humdrum of life.

Now is All We Have

We truly possess nothing else. I thought recently of the inventor of the Monopoly board game—those royalties alone would be enough to live very nicely on for a whole lifetime. Yet, it’s only a lifetime. All people have both their lifetimes and their demise.

This is not a depressing reality when we stay ourselves in the moment and understand something like the breath that freely infuses the lungs right now; we breathe in and then out again, and in that we’re blessed! It is a ‘safe’ now.

The ‘Now’s’ of our Future

The times of our future will have us reminiscing to a tune so tantalisingly memorable. We’ll want to go back to our pasts and somehow recapture them, though we can’t. People go to extraordinary lengths to re-establish what was, but they forget that it’s not possible to replicate times like these—or anything in the past for that matter.

We must stay relevantly in the present, enjoying now for what it is, and then via faith, we’ll actually not pine to any irreconcilable level in the future when looking back. We’ll somehow understand what was, was.

We’ll know we did our best back then (i.e. now) to enjoy and make the most of life, especially in the context of loved ones. We’ll have a guilt-free life then by living the ‘now,’ now.

NOW: Cherish It, No Matter ‘Where’ You Are

Some circumstances make it incredibly hard to achieve this imperative; for instance, profound grief. These times mark the ‘now’ as a reprehensible thief.

But, where we can live happily in the now we should.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.