“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander around in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does…….” Blaise Pascal
Everyone agrees it’s important “to live in the moment”, but the problem is how. Psychologists will tell you that “people are not in the moment, they’re not there to know that they’re not there.” Their answer seems to be overriding the distraction reflex and awakening to the present.
The answer sounds logical until you think about the poor child living on the streets of India. Although it is a long ways from the desperation of the kid in India, for the struggling artist “living in the moment” has its challenges.
I have been very fortunate working with many artists who ended up very successful in the entertainment world. It is the ones that never forgot where they came from that made the greatest impression on my life. If they had one thing in common, it was their ability to “live in the moment” even before they were discovered. Barry McGuire. Garth Brooks, Donny & Marie Osmond, Linda Ronstadt, and Aaron Neville come immediately to mind. Today they are the same people I knew back in the day, the “machine” (fame) didn’t gobble them up.
At the risk of sounding preachy, without seeing the eternal significance of the “moment”, life seems to be a bit meaningless.