Mind in the Present

Oh! Where are you my mind

Do not day-dream and run with the wind

Or ruminate and be left behind

Just be present and enjoy the find

Life is beautiful when love is blind.

One of the greatest assets that humans have been endowed with is their thinking mind. Undoubtedly, our mind is the engine that has propelled and carried us forward in the race of life. Mind is the thinking faculty of our brain. Our mind helps us in various ways to evaluate situations, judge the options, make our decisions, and provides us alternatives by means of creativity and imagination. This mind has thus been a great ally for us. Amongst all the living species, human mind is the most developed and we have been using it to our advantage in the struggle for survival. It has served us really well.

Mind is also the instrument using which we centre ourselves on the time dimension. It allows us to move back and forth and even surge forward in the time. Moving back in time, our mind helps us ruminate over past events. It can bring up all the old memories, feelings and thoughts associated with the past event, whether good or bad. Good thoughts and events from the past further ignite pleasurable feelings. Bad and uncomfortable thoughts incite hard feelings. Our mind also allows us to move forward in time to a future with help of our imagination. It creates daydreams or nightmares based on our thoughts. And these seemingly innocuous thoughts shape our life. Thus, our mind keeps swinging like a pendulum between the past and the future. It has been compared with a monkey that is always jumping from one branch of a tree to another. It is quite unstable in nature and is cause of most of our misery.

Spending too much time either on the past or on the future robs us of the time we need to spend on the present. In order to shape our future, we need to work on the present. But our restless mind makes it difficult for us to focus on the present. Our mind, though a good servant, is a bad master. We have to have our mind serve us faithfully than be subservient to it. Our life can be free of stress and full of happiness by always being in the present, living here and now.

I ask you a simple question: Is there anything troubling you at this present moment, now? There can be nothing troubling you if you are fully present, if you are reading this article and focusing completely on enjoying this moment. If there is anything at all that is troubling you, it will be in your mind which would be an event which has already occurred or something that you imagine would occur. By learning to focus our mind completely in the moment, surrendering our self totally to the demand of the present, getting fully involved in the now, we can stop the mind from wavering between the past and future.This would channel our immense potential to be concentrated in the present activity. We can then produce masterpieces in our life.