Living the Day

How many days do we have? Maybe 30,000, maybe even 35,000 days in our lifetime, if we are very lucky. How many of those precious days do we have left? We do what we can to live a healthy lifestyle and hope for the best. Yet not all days are equal. Some days we accomplish more and some less. Some days we enjoy more and some less. Some days seem longer, more saturated than others. How many of the days of our life do we actually live? What makes our life worthwhile? When we come near our last day and we survey our life, by what criteria will we assess it? What would make us feel satisfied that ours was a life well-lived?

Yet we take all of that as referring only to our outer life, not our inner life. The measures of quality and even duration radically differ between our outer life and our inner life, because inner time is not clock time and inner experience is not sensory experience. Consider a moment when you are fully present, quiet inside, and inwardly just being. Time has vanished and you are in eternity, the great eternal Now. Everything simply is. Eternity is an inner dimension orthogonal to time. In time things happen. In eternity things are. Consciousness is in eternity.

How long is a moment in eternity? What is its duration? Does duration even apply? What is its value? Look into your own experience of presence. How does a moment of presence compare to an ordinary moment of time in your life? You may find that moments without presence are relatively devoid of content, of life, and of value compared to a moment of presence. Without presence, you are not here to live this moment. Without presence, experience is robotic: a relatively shallow and dull existence, leaving little or no trace.

This indicates a direction for living our best life. It is not only about following our bliss, doing what brings us joy, accomplishing great things, being with people we love, or doing something useful. All of that certainly matters in a deep way. But parallel to that is the equally important matter of how we live our inner life. We can only experience joy if we are there. We can only love if we are there. We cannot sleepwalk our way to accomplishments, large or small. Ultimately, there is no separation between our outer life and our inner life, with each setting the tone for the other.

Our work on presence affects everything, short-term and long, inner and outer. A day with relatively more presence is a day that seems full, more complete, more engaged, and longer. We enrich our life, and the lives we touch, by enhancing our presence.

So what do we do in this whirlwind of life? We bring more to it. We bring ourselves, the whole of ourselves to it. We bring our body, our awareness of the sensitive energy in our whole body, into whatever we are doing. We bring our attention, our full attention into whatever we are doing. We bring our mind, our gradually quieting and clarifying mind. We bring our heart, our gradually more peaceful and warming heart. We bring ourselves, our relaxing, unified self, into whatever we are doing. That way we are present to life.

This takes practice, consistent and persistent, long-term, ever-renewing practice. We feel the enduring and urgent need to live our life in presence, and we inwardly act on that need, every time we feel it or remember it. Each such moment makes the next one more possible, more likely.

Eventually, without our realizing it at first, presence becomes the basic undertone of our life, our default yet extraordinary state. We live each day in consciousness. We live in equanimity. We live in our body, heart, and mind. We live in the timeless. We are our attention. We are. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but always here. Always is a time-bound label for eternity, for the timeless. Always.

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