Hi Fabulous Traveler,

In the last moments of your life, surrounded by your loved ones, you lose consciousness for a moment. When you wake up, you notice the faint lines of a silhouette disappear in the room, hear a voice whispering in your ear, weary, appearing from beyond the grave. You see pictures of your life passing by before you, passages from your entire existence, gone in seconds.

You are always thinking about the loved one you lost. You imagine them asleep by your side, feel the sudden urge to hug them. As you pretend to hug them, you experience a hollow pleasure, sad, tinged with the harsh reality where you find yourself with each foot in a different world. You are followed by solitary sadness, in a constant state of fragile balance, mentally switching between the past and the present.

Meanwhile, all around you, cars are passing by, people run by you, the order of the world continues without worrying about you. You are dreaming of a promotion. You work long hours, imagining the day it finally happens and brings the financial comfort you have longed for: Will you use the money to go on an adventurous trip? Or maybe you want to take your family on an idyllic island vacation? You already imagine your feet in the water, overwhelmed by an intense pleasure and more intense desire to achieve your goal.

You are full of burning energy and ready to face some more months of your monotonous routine! So, you start a new work day as always, carrying in your heart the hope of a happy future which you consider inaccessible at the time. You live only for the events and expectations of the future, never for the present moment.

Meanwhile, around you, relationships develop and fall apart, some houses are built, others destroyed, life goes on without paying mind to you. You start to regret this crazy behavior. You keep reliving your imagined scene, coloring in all the details more vividly, adding sounds, feelings, and even the flavors of the moment, but it keeps leaving a bitter aftertaste.

You should have behaved differently! “Why did I do that? Why did I reply like that?” You wish you could alter the course of history, so you return to your imagination, to scenes where you are the hero, conqueror, cunning, charming, full of verve and wit. Then reality returns again, sharp as a sword, and does not allow for any compromise.

Meanwhile, around you, as you dream of the future and revisit the past, humans are born, others die, and time goes by without even noticing your existence.

Only the present deserves our attention

For a large part of our lives, we are drawn between nostalgia and regrets about the past and our hopes and expectations for the future, although we should dedicate all our efforts to the present.

The real range of our actions is reduced to this very second, consisting of fleeting, successive moments. The past and future are beyond our reach. We can ruminate and dream, but that doesn’t change anything about our reality. Only the present deserves our full attention. Yet often, we get carried away by the flow of our memories or the arrival of the boat towards bright hopes of a better future.

We live in a constant state of detachment, telling ourselves that we can do our work consciously and to the best of our abilities, if we only decided to do so. Then we work on projects half-heartedly, believing that our moment to completely devote ourselves to a task has not yet come, and fail to recognize the absurdity of this incessant detachment.

It would be significant enough to realize that each moment possesses an infinite value, and that it is worth pouring all our abilities and efforts into the task at hand, even if it’s of little importance. If taken seriously, the simplest act turns into something special. That way, even shelling peas can become interesting, even captivating:

“Shelling peas is easy. Press your thumb onto the edge of the pod and it opens readily. Some pods, less ripened, are more reluctant, but with an incision of the nail of your index finger, you can tear through the green pod, feel the denseness of the flesh under the thin skin. Then you use the fingers to remove the peas. The last one is really tiny. Sometimes, we want to eat it right away. It’s not very good, a little bitter, but fresh as cold spring water. Nearby, by the sink, some crisp, fresh carrots drying on a rag. We speak slowly, the melody of the words seeming to come from within, peaceful, familiar. From time to time, we raise our heads to look the other in silence, but our opposite has to keep their head down – it’s part of the code.” The Small Pleasures of Life— Philippe Delerm.

Only the present deserves our full attention. This moment is the only moment we can control and influence. This moment, which has already passed, this instant, that has just gone by. Do you see how fleeting time is? If we choose to ignore it and instead think about our past or hope for a bright future, we spend the large majority of our life neglecting our actual life in that moment.

Feeling alive

Hear what's around you, feel your body, your right hand. Hold out your hand, watch it move. Return to this moment. Look at the painting in front of you as if you are seeing it for the first time, paying mind to the details of the work, the story behind it, imagining the artist who painted it. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Rediscover those sounds that have grown familiar to you, become mindful, observe people, the details of their faces, the movements of their breath, the expressions on their faces and the individual experiences of those before you, lost in their own thoughts. Get up and imagine your neighbors’ houses, the thousands of people working on their own lives. Feel what you felt a few moments ago… this is not you anymore. Every moment, every second, your being changes, gets entangled, undulates, and then recomposes itself.

This very moment

But how to learn to fully appreciate the present moment? The first step is to look around you, not simply by casting a fleeting glance without going deeper. It’s about reaching a state where you see the trees moving, notice the shifting of a leaf from a distance, feel the breeze of the wind touching your skin. It’s about staying in a vigilant state that observes all that surrounds us, to get rid of the dull addiction that removes us from the bright spark of our humanity.

It is to dedicate oneself fully to what is in front of us, to devote ourselves to it as if it were the work of our life. It is then also to keep in oneself the thought of death, not to become gloomy and fatalistic, but simply to appreciate the present moment at its true irreplaceable value. It is to be able to look death in the eyes and to rise from it revitalized, intoxicated and exalted by the love of live.

Do you want to live a good life? Do not worry about the past, it is the least likely to harm you.

Continually rejoice in the present moment, show no hatred toward men.

And the future, leave that to God.

Faust — Goethe

What do you see in a flower?

Richard Feynman is a Nobel Prize winning physicist, who is well-known for his simple, clear explanations. In this video, he helps us realize all the possible ways of beauty that are contained in a simple flower: 

This Week’s Plan

Mastering the ability to stay within the present moment is the foundation of a full and joyful life, releasing you from the shackles of the before and after, immersing you in the vivid experience of living. Seneca wrote we must “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life”. How rich are the possibilities of this perspective? This week, you have the opportunity to inhabit it.

Your goal

Three evenings this week, you’re going to find a quiet time and place to explore The Value of the Present Guide in the Meditation section. This will be added to your evening routine when you hit Accept below!

How should I meditate?

In the meditation, you’ll see the new meditation trainings that we’ve added. If you want to take a quick peek of what the Value of the Present has to offer right now, tap below to start!

How are you feeling Fabulous Traveler? We hope that with each mental exercise, you are discovering a gradually expanding sense of freedom, a growing excitement, a determined strength. Each moment offers itself to you to create as you choose with it, to manifest and experience through it again and again. Focus yourself on the task of this, and next week you will zoom out out out, moving from the immediate to a position that offers a vast and humbling view.