🎯🌟Why Today is the Best Day of Your Life
Let's Develop our Present Practice
Dear Why Team Member,
I hope this week’s message finds you well and will serve as a helpful reminder to live more in the present to elevate the quality and experience of your life.
Why?
Because life is only here and now - we cannot live in yesterday or tomorrow. Our minds can focus on thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow, but we are only living in the Here, the Now.
Today is always the Best Day of our life!
Consider how we label our days as good days and bad days. Clearly there are days in which we have experienced great joy, weddings, and the birth of children - from which gratitude naturally flows. And there are those days of hardship and heartbreak, unmet expectations, and disappointment. We label days as “best day” or “worst day” or maybe “just another day” many times forgetting to be grateful for the fact that we were given this day. Having a comparing mindset can set us up to be longing for more good days while fearing more bad days.
Our brain is wired to look for patterns and find answers. We lived this day, period - immediately the brain starts assessing it, labeling it, and storing the information so it can react to future situations based on the information it stored. How many of us feel that we'll have a bad day just because the day started with less than positive news.
How sad really that we assign an experience to our entire day - living often in anticipation of that next moment in the future where we will again have something to be excited about or disturbed by; but what about now?
How many of our days suffer from comparison?
Did you notice that only fear and scarcity trigger comparison? Think of a happy moment you recently lived; did you stop enjoying it to think “oh, but there was a time when I was happier than now"? No. Our lives can only truly be lived in the now when there’s no past or future to judge and compare. Are you present now to see the changing color of the leaves, hear the wind and the birds in the trees?
Have you ever considered that all spiritual practice is present practice? Pick a religion, do they not have practices that are designed to make you more present?! Those who live more in the present are more present in their life, knowing the best moment of their life is in the present moment because it is the only place they are actually living. As John Kabat-Zinn teaches: "Wherever you go, there you are" and no place else. If you experience any emotional suffering, notice how much of it is because you are thinking on the past or the future. Today presents more than enough opportunities to live fully, and frankly is the only place we can live fully, in the here and now where we live.
I know this is a theme I share often, and I believe it's because so much of our core challenges arise from not being present with our life and opportunities at hand.
It occurred to me recently that the hardest part of my climb up the Glacier Mt. Baker, seven years ago, was not the climb itself, but the two months prior to the climb. Anxiety around what could happen was much more of a challenge to overcome than the actual climb. In fact, the climb itself was thrilling as I was incredibly present with the tasks at hand - experiencing life more fully because I was present with life.
Consider even more attention and focus on your life in the here and now!
Of course, plan and have a vision for your future, lay out the path, but then return your focus to now and enjoy each step. Set your compass, know your direction, be okay with the unexpected and at peace with new paths that present themselves, but above all, be with your steps, enjoying them and being grateful to have them. As we have heard, life is a journey, not a destination. Be okay just being and marvel at the doing that naturally arises.
Make this week the best week of your life - because it is!
Steve Luckenbach