LIVE IN THE PRESENT MOMENT

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this."
- Henry David Thoreau

We've all heard of the importance of "living in the present moment" but I believe most of us fail to really grasp how to apply that principle. It is an absolutely beautiful principle and one that can completely set you free from fear, anxiety and worry. After all, ask yourself what percentage of the problems you might worry about right now are actually happening RIGHT NOW? Unless your reading this book while being chased by a pitbull, the overwhelming likelihood is that whatever you could be worrying about right now, won't actually hurt you right now, but some time in the future. . . . MAYBE.

For every disaster you worry about occurring in the future, there is a corresponding potential miracle that can make it moot. Things have come and gone through your life so unexpectedly that you couldn't have possibly envisioned the vast majority of it.

One of the funniest things I have ever done was thumbing through my 1991 high school year book. In mine, there was a section where you fill out where you expected to be at 5 years, 10 years, 15 years and so on. I obviously found it quite amusing that at 18 years old I really believed it would only take 5 short years to marry the woman of my dreams (who of course I hadn't even met yet), become a millionaire navy fighter pilot (top gun was very popular and I had no idea what the Navy paid), and have two kids!! But what was much more interesting to me was when I began to contemplate it, I realized that there has NEVER been a time in my life where I could have accurately predicted where I would have been 5 years later. Not just the job I'd be doing, but where I'd be living, the divorce I would go through, the family members I'd lose suddenly, the coaching practice I would start. Try it. Go back five years and ask yourself whether you could have possibly seen exactly where you are today back then.

I remember the greatest birthday present I had ever given my father and how it became the greatest gift I ever gave myself. . .

I had a long history of buying my father birthday presents that he would want to return. Every year when Dad would open up my present he would start by asking "how much did you spend on this?" Then. . ."Where did you get this?". . . and finally "do you still have the receipt?" It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the effort, he just hated the idea of his kids spending money on something he may not actually use.

But in 2007 I was determined that this birthday would be different. I would finally buy dad a present that I thought he would want; not a present that I thought he should want! I bought him and I tickets to the King Tut exhibit in Philadelphia! He was a history buff and this was real history, right in our backyard! It would be perfect. During the week before his birthday weekend I went to buy the tickets online. I was going to actually go the following weekend for no reason other than I didn't really feel like going to 'a museum' this weekend and next weekend seemed like a few years away at the time. As fate would have it, I accidentally clicked the Sunday of dad's birthday weekend just 3 days away. I would have had to call someone to change it and that would have defeated the ease and simplicity of buying Dad's tickets online. So I just left it and figured I'd "get it out of the way". Nonetheless, I knew dad would love it, so I printed the tickets and put them in his card.

The following day I was bursting with excitement to see his face when I gave him these tickets. He started tearing at the envelope, flipped open the card, pulled out the tickets and said. . . .
"how much did you spend on these?"

Damn! Not only was I not really looking forward to going, but Dad didn't even want to go!

"When is this?", Dad asked hesitantly.

"Tomorrow! And we are going!", I snapped.

The next day my father and I had the best day I have ever spent with him. We spent the entire day together. We saw and experienced priceless pieces of ancient history. We learned all about this amazing civilization together. Our minds were expanded in multiple dimensions. We had dinner at our favorite diner and just enjoyed each other's company all day long. It was really a beautiful day for a father and son to experience together. . .

36 hours later, I was standing in the waiting room of Kennedy Memorial Hospital in the middle of the night listening to a doctor tell me that my father had died at 59 years old from a massive heart attack.

You have no idea what two minutes from now looks like. You also have no idea which relatively meaningless moments may become the most memorable and rich moments of your entire life. To this day, I thank God for my "accident" of clicking the "wrong" date on that website. Had I chosen the date that I wanted, the tickets would have been for the date that I buried my father. Your present moments are precious. They are beautifully precious. More than money. More than new cars, big houses and perfect careers. The present moment, the right now, the only time that really ever exists is right in your hand, but only for a moment.

"In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time." - Leonardo Da Vinci