Over the last few weeks, I have heard from multiple people, in multiple places and circumstances, saying the same thing: stay focused on the present. That can be a very difficult thing to do for those of us who are grief-stricken. Oftentimes our minds are going in every which direction and living in the present moment can be a major challenge for us. Our minds spend a lot of time in the past, focusing on past memories of our deceased loved ones. We may have a strong yearning and aching in our hearts for a time in our lives that is over and will not be returning. Our minds might then drift into the future, and then we can become anxious and overwhelmed, thinking about all the negative things that could happen to us -- we simply have no way of envisioning a positive future for ourselves. Life might begin to feel very bleak and dire for us.
The fact is that none of us knows what the future holds. Think about where you were 10, 20, 30 years ago. Did you ever imagine back then that your life would be where it is today? I sure didn't. If anything, if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that my predictions of how my life would look in the future have almost always been wrong. How many of us, back in 2017, would have correctly answered the question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
When we really think about it, the present is all we have. Things and events constantly crop up in our lives that we didn't foresee. And it's not just the future that we have an incomplete picture of -- every now and then I will hear about someone from my past, many years ago, and I will learn about something that was going on in their lives during the time that I knew them that I wasn't aware of. In that sense, we don't fully know the past either, or we're remembering it with a lot of missing information.
Back to the present. There's a saying I try to remember whenever I feel worried or anxious: "Mile by mile, life's a trial. Yard by yard, life's not so hard. Inch by inch, life's a cinch." Life becomes more manageable when we focus on what's immediately in front of us and leave everything else out. The past has happened and cannot be changed, and the future is unknowable. What's become important for me is what I do and how I live for today -- not in a sense of "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" -- but in terms of "What can I do to make my life better right now? And what can I do to make the lives better of those around me?"
Over at hopefultransitions.com, Sherry Williams White has a great article, Living in the Moment. Sherry was 26 years old when she lost her 47 year-old mom to cancer. She knows the difficulty in trying to stay focused on the present:
"When someone you love or care about dies, you experience a wide range of emotions. Your mind goes over and over what happened, wanting to know every detail. You begin to think about all of the things you could have said, should have said, could have done, and should have done. You begin to think about all of the things that person meant to you. All that you shared in life and all of the wishes you have for the future. You begin to focus on what will happen next. How will you go on? You think of all there is to do and all there will be to do in the future. As you fill your head with this huge list of things that must be done or will have to be done, it is easy to feel overwhelmed."
Sherry also has a number of practical tips in her article on how we can live more in the present moment. Like anything else, it takes practice, but is very much worth doing!
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