One of my continuing issues is that I’m either hashing over things that happened in the past or I’m concerning myself with things that may/will happen in the future. While my brain is frittering away on these thoughts, it is completely missing the now and all the amazing things associated with it. Contrast that with my children who often do not know what they will be doing ten minutes in the future, let along ten days. They live almost totally in the now and enjoy much less stress because of it.

It is funny to listen to Piers talk at times. He will be going on about something that he was pretending to do with his toys and speak with the utmost sincerity, believing he actually did those things. Sometimes he will talk about something we did as a family weeks ago. He’ll just blurt out “The big Wall-e’s helped the little Wall-e” event though we had not talked about that movie for weeks. Often it takes Amy and I a moment to mentally trace a path back to what Piers is talking about, but to him it is as if we went to the movies yesterday.

The ability to enjoy the now and not worry about the past and future is one of the things I envy the most about my children. I cannot tell you how many times I’m driving down the street and see something new and usual, maybe a new store has opened, comment about it to my wife, only to find out that it has been there for months. It became new to me because that was the first time I saw it, even though I had passed by it countless times before. Why did I never notice it? More specifically, why did I just now notice it? Odds are I was to busy thinking about other things while I drove past it each and every time. To me that says, I spend to much time thinking about my life and not enough time living it.

That is one of the reasons I enjoy camping so much. By eliminating the distractions of the modern day and finding myself in the woods, I end of being amazed at the world around me. I do not worry about what is coming up next week or if I handled something poorly last week, I just sit in my chair with a book and enjoy nature.

One time when I was at work I experienced an incredibly high stress level. To help combat it, I was listening to a tape about dealing with stress and living in the now was one of the concepts. Let tomorrow take care of itself and concentrate on today. To help with this point, the speaker asked if you knew what the little paper strip in a Hershey’s Kiss says. This is something that everyone has held in their hands, most likely many times and yet odds are, you have no idea what it says. I’ll give you a hint, it is not Hershey’s Kisses.

So take a look around you as you drive home from work today. Enjoy the beauty you can find in the world just by taking your mind off the things of tomorrow and concentrate on the things of today. The past has already happened and the future will come soon enough. You can only experience the now right now, otherwise it slips away forever.