Jose Ortega Y Gasset said, “The most compelling thing about life is its immediacy. It is fired at us point blank”. I think that says a lot for why we need to learn to live in the moment and not become trapped in our internal conversations about this and that, forever chasing the future that never arrives or dragging the past forward like a yoke….

We live too much of our lives in our head, wishing and wanting things to happen later and regretting and resenting what is already gone … and life doesn’t care what we think. Life is just what happens while we’re waiting to die. The question is “who” is waiting and what shall we do while we wait.

I have been wondering a lot about procrastination…why people think there is still time. I have a friend who retired a few years ago and she told me all the things she planned to do when she was free from her commitments at work. Recently, she was complaining that she still has the same list and, although she has dabbled a bit here and there, she hasn’t done most of what she said she wanted to do. Her ‘internal conversation’ about life and herself is much the same as it always has been. Whether she is thinking about exercise, diet, hobbies or community projects, it is still all about ‘later’—“when I have time”.

I suggest we will never have time.

Time is created through our actions and commitments. We don’t fill time. Time fills us. That is why the busiest people always have time for more commitments. I think that I will begin now, living the life I want to live. In doing so, I’ll discover what is missing. As long as I am thinking about ‘when’, I will never be in action….

Now is when it is.

This is where it is.

You are who it is.