20240421 : living in the moment

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I was talking to my dog this morning. 

No! I have not lost my mind. It's perfectly normal to talk to your dog!
It's weird if the dog talks back to you though... 

She is very attached to my wife and daughters and gets very anxious when all 3 of them are not at home. 

My wife and daughters have gone for a few days for a holiday. Ever since they left, she has been crying often ( read howling) and has been on a "Satyagraha" boycotting food. 

So I was telling her this morning, that they are coming back tomorrow morning and everything will be fine. 

And she gave me that strange, blank, questioning look probably wondering "what is this human telling me. I don't recognise this command". 

And I realised with that blank look that she doesn't know tomorrow. For that matter, she doesn't know today. She only knows now.. she is living completely in the moment! 

Not just her, every animal and being lives only in the moment. 

Sure, some species gather and store food for a rainy day, but that's not because they are worried about the future and plan for it. It's completely instinctive to do it. 

Same with migratory birds who fly thousands of kilometres to mate and lay eggs. Or a Salmon swimming upstream for the same outcome. Everything is preprogrammed in their brains. 

Their brains are honed for their species to be born, live avoiding death, replicate and die. It's super efficiently tuned for their species. 

We also have this ability. It's the combination of our brain stem and the limbic brain. It probably is a very small part of the overall brain but does 95+% of the things required for just the exact thing - live, avoid death, replicate & perish. 

That's the brain that lives in the moment. 

But we have evolved out of the limbic system and have developed a much bigger brain to not live in the moment. So that we can think, we can reason, we can plan, we can question, we can do this and that and everything else that we are capable of doing. 

It has probably taken us millions of years to do just that. So that we don't have to live in the moment. 

Yes, it's very fashionable nowadays to say we should live in the moment. To take the time to smell the flowers, etc , etc. what they are all really saying is - enjoy the small things and small pleasures of life. 

Definitely not asking you to let go of your human abilities and go back to "living in the moment" 

Comments

  1. Anonymous22/4/24 10:16

    Past is gone Future is uncertain. Present is in your hands. Enjoy what you have is the best principal I adopted.

    ReplyDelete

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