Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of attention.
-- Jim Rohn

Just before falling asleep last night, when the house was quiet and serene – the only sounds the low hum of the refrigerator, the crickets outside, and the faint whistle in your breathing – you took a moment to reflect on your day. And what a day it was! It must’ve been. Why else would you have been so tired and worn? But what exactly did you do yesterday?

Well, you remember waking up and offering your morning prayers. But what did you pray for? You remember getting dressed, even what you wore and checking yourself out in the mirror. But do you remember and did you stop and consider with complete alertness what you saw when you looked at yourself? Or did you just do a quick scan, straighten you collar, and keep going?

Do you remember listening intently to your thoughts and what others had to say throughout the day, or did you have so many things on your mind that no one thing penetrated your consciousness? Did you stay so close to the surface of the day that everything felt surreal, incomplete, and artificial? Perhaps you got a lot done yesterday; you completed a project, made valuable connections, you may have even saved a rainforest or figured out how to help NASA put the tiles back in place. But if you didn’t get a grasp of any particular moment, if attention to the inner recesses of life – the nuts and bolts stuff that give it depth and meaning – was lacking, if you failed to observe the unfolding of life around you, your existence today had no experience at all. What a wasted day.

Living in the moment is just that; it’s being “alive” at this moment. It is being present right here and right now. Being present in the moment allows you the opportunity to enmesh yourself into this time, fully getting from it the joys and displeasures only available during that moment. It is being alert and awake to what is around you, and taking in the messages and the variety of experiences and nuances, no matter how small, of the present time. Being present, living in the moment, is wholly concentrating on where you are, what you’re doing, and how it all feels to you.

Bet you don’t even remember the experience of driving to work this morning. Bet you can’t recall the movement of the trees or the state of the people you encountered on your way in to work this morning. You were caught up in anything but the moment. Perhaps you should have stayed home instead of wasting your moments in time.

Life is but a moment, and it must be experienced moment by moment. If we spend our moments rushing through them or passing them by without bare attention to their existence, we miss opportunities and possibilities and, most importantly, we miss our precious Selves who are waiting to be attended. Life is but a moment but it’s about the moments within. Pay attention to them.

Sadiqqa © 2007