Every Moment is Unique
The present moment is the most important moment in your life. Perhaps you’re doing something you consider very trivial, like drinking a glass of water. Surely, you’ve done this a million times before and will likely do it a million more times in your life. But those past and future actions, while similar to your current preoccupation, are not your current action. Everything we do we do only once. Everything is unique. In fact, I am having a glass of water right now. I have never had this glass of water before and will never have it again in the future. It’s wonderful experience because I realize that I have only this moment to drink it.
One way to free ourselves from the prison of habituated thought is to cultivate a keen interest in everything that unfolds before us. Reality is a continuous unfolding of thoughts, actions, and events some predictable, some not so predictable. We often rely on preconceived ideas and assumptions about certain things and let these notions to color our reaction to them. However, if we engage every new moment as a unique moment, every new breath as a unique breath, we realize that our current preoccupation is the only moment that matters. We awaken to the realization that nothing, however trivial and mundane it may seem, can be taken for granted.
By cultivating interest in reality I do not mean analyzing or conceptualizing them. Rather, having a direct encounter with reality. To perceive events mindfully is to perceive them as they are, without passing them through the filters of personal biases, prejudices, and so on. To dwell in the present moment gives us the sublime quality of coming to life for the first time, just like a baby exploring his new world for the first time.
Oftentimes our quality of life is not dictated by our circumstances we face as they are by our perception of them. Rather we put our lives on automatic pilot and let our conditioned thought pattern dictate our like or dislike. Mental laziness is the source of frustration and stress.
Another barrier to mindfulness, especially in the West, is that we’re goal-oriented. Our minds are fixed on the outcome rather than the process. We’re always holding out for that final moment for which our live revolve. If that moment ever arrives, what makes us think that we can finally sieze it? If everything we do is for something that may happen in the distant future, we are really perfecting our capacity to dream, plan, expect, and if that final moment ever arrives, we’d have no clue on how to deal with it.
By realizing that we have nothing to live for except this moment, this place, these conditions and circumstances, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the mundane, sacred.