Reason #21 to Be Happy: Friendly Friday Guest Post- Phalon from Except Narwhals

Friends! I am so excited for today's guest post! One of my very dearest friends, Phalon, is going to be sharing her thoughts with us. I love this girl! From the moment I met her I knew that she was very unique and absolutely gorgeous in every way. You can visit her at www.exceptnarwhals.blogspot.com . I'm sure she would love to hear from you!

The power of living in the moment.

“let everything happen to you—beauty and terror; just keep going. No feeling is final.”

-rainer rilke

Recently I’ve thought a lot about living in the moment. I’m currently spending my summer break from college volunteering at an organic farm in Olympia, Washington, right on the beach. We grow every vegetable you can think of as well as raise chickens and sheep that have tons of roaming space. My host family recycles everything , eats all organic, and practices meditation. I know what you’re thinking—HIPPIES! Well, sort of.

One day I spent some time discussing with them what exactly they gain from meditation. The very purpose of meditation is clearing the mind and living in the current moment.

Their responses, among others:

-better sleep

-higher patience

-improved concentration

-easier strategizing

-overall sense of well-being

-more rational decision making

Seems pretty simplistic, right? Living in the moment. Today is Thursday. Did I live in thursday today? Yeah! Sure did….didn’t I?

Once you stop to think about it, when’s the last time you’ve just thought about…the current moment? How much time do we spend worrying about the past—as well as the future—however near? Even now, as I’m writing this, in the back of my mind I’m going over my to-do list for tomorrow.  We live in the age of distraction.

Life unfolds in the moment. So often we allow precious seconds to slip away, unsiezed and untouched. How sad is that?

Although I don’t see myself becoming the next meditation guru (I am far too ADHD for that), I strive to focus more on the present moment. I recently deliberately tried to focus on and capture the present moment a few times since this particular discussion, and—for the brief moments it lasted, it felt…fantastic. But just as quickly as the clarity of the moment occurred, it left. Have our minds become computed to drift…to a completely different time?

I just turned 24 years old. It really crept up on me and there are times when I still stop and think,

“wow. am I really not a teenager anymore?”

The point is, life slips by. I hereby challenge any reader to—once a day – attempt to capture the present. In the good, the bad, the frightening, the sensual…it’s all beautiful. Because it’s all  N O W. 

And at some point in time, it’ll be yesterday.