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Live in the Moment
 “Live every moment.”“Be in the present.” “Don’t take life for granted.” We’ve heard these statements all of our lives. They sound good, but at the same time they feel a bit like platitudes; nice in theory but not realistic unless we are relaxing on vacation. Otherwise, they feel like quaint reminders that have little effect when our schedules seem to continue piling higher and higher. Recently, about 500 people including myself experienced a wake up call about what it means to “live in the moment”. We were attending the funeral of a relatively young mother, beloved by her community, who passed from this world too soon. Two of the eulogies quoted the famous words of Abraham Lincoln, "And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years”. In that moment, as we were saying goodbye to this special woman leaving behind a husband and small child, the words struck the heart of every one of us in the room. In other words, it really is true. Those quotes aren’t platitudes; they are truths, maybe even profound truths about the nature of life itself. The question remains then, how do we “do” it? How do we live the moment-to-moment experiences of our lives without being busy in our heads about what is and isn’t getting done but rather “doing” the tasks of life while experiencing the richness, preciousness, and beauty of the moment? What if the answer to this question lay not in something we were supposed to “do” rather in by stopping something we are already doing? A great Chassidic Master once said that we are either in one of two places, the world of our thoughts about life, or in life itself. In the world of our thoughts, we can live in all kinds of illusions about why it’s more important to perform this particular task than give our full attention to what our child is telling us, why it’s more important that this person believe what I believe to be true rather than listening to someone else’s ideas, and why it’s justified to be irritated when something doesn’t go our way instead of considering it may not be for the best in that moment. The Hebrew expression for being caught up in our heads is “Bilbul Hadaas” or, a “tumultuous or pressured mind.” It’s a state of mind that does not allow us to experience the quality of the moment, in fact, it doesn’t allow us to experience the moment at all. The answer to experiencing the richness of the moment is so simple it would be easy to walk right by it without even noticing. The second we quiet down the internal noise in our heads we naturally begin to become present, deeply present to whatever is all around us. The Chasidic masters call this state of mind “Yishuv Hadaas” or “a settled, relaxed mind” and it’s ever-present and available to us at all times, only it gets clouded over by the storminess of our make-believe thoughts that somehow look so compelling to us. It’s that simple. Try it. Do exactly what you do everyday, only now start to become aware of all the internal noise in your head and let it go right through - allow your mind to relax, wait for the thoughts to pass and you will begin to see and experience the unbelievable gift of the moment you find yourself in, without doing or changing anything. As you go through the same day you will find that your experience of the same tasks will take on a different look and feel. They become qualitatively better, nicer, more fulfilling. Nothing has changed. Nothing that is, except for you. There is not one person on this earth who won’t tell you that when they are in a good state of mind they don’t do life better, whether it’s an athlete talking about “the zone”, a parent trying to teach a principle to their child, or even someone preparing for an emergency meeting. The truth is that not only do they perform better, they actually are enriched, moved, or even inspired by their day-to-day experience. They are living the meaning of the quotes at the top of this page in real time, and that is what life is all about. Once in a while, we have an experience, like the funeral of a beloved wife and mother, where we drop all the internal noise in our heads and our Yishuv Hadaas flows in it’s place, allowing us to take in the magic and preciousness of the moment. That moment is a gift from G-d to us and now is the time. Shabbat Shalom, Chaim Levine Levitan Executive Director LivingJudaism http://www.livingjudaism.com |