Every Moment Presents a Choice

The new year is upon us.

But today, rather than reflect on the prior year or plans for the future, I think we could use a reminder of a power we have always had.

That is the power to choose the direction of our lives, every moment of every day.

Sure, there is a life path we have found ourselves on through having created it, stumbled upon it, or found ourselves in it through necessity.

For better or worse, this is the reality of our lives.

Yet we always have choices.

A thought that has occurred to me is that many of us don’t truly understand the number of choices available to us in a given day.

Consider this: A dear friend once criticized me upon realizing that in a day we spent together, he had made every decision about what we did. He got tired of it, and he asked me:

Have you even made a single choice today?

His question made me realize that every moment of that day had presented me with a choice. I could go along the easy route with the path unfolding before me, or I could fight against it.

Neither way is necessarily better than the other, but that is the key, predominant choice of our lives. Flow along with the stream of destiny, or work to create your own path.

I explained to my friend that I had made countless choices that day, all of which involved doing what he wanted to do and spending time with him. Even in that moment of discussion, I had chosen to continue our conversation rather than part ways.

Every moment is a choice.

It so happens that with me, when everything is going well, I don’t fight the path in front of me. I allow it to unfold as it does, to take me where it flows, but I am still choosing that.

But what about when your life’s path presents more and more obstacles, and you dread what lies ahead?

In such cases, we must use the power we have to make a choice.

Even if you made a mistake, and for 100 moments in a day, you chose to continue along a futile, unrewarding, miserable path, you still have the power at any moment to change that.

Every moment of every day gives you the opportunity to change it all around.

Even when it comes to mental states – if, in the course of a day, you find yourself unhappy and bored, you can ask what choices led you to that. And if you make new choices in a different direction, can you begin to find the happiness and stimulation that you need?

Taking things further, even our beliefs about ourselves or the world, and thus the emotional states that may follow can be a choice.

Here is a belief some people may hold:

I believe I have little power, and my life’s path has been decided by my parents, the government, or society.

The issue with that belief would be that it completely nullifies your ability to choose your life’s path. If you are willing to accept your power of choice in every moment of every day and do something with it, then you have that power in you.

However, if you are not willing to accept that you have that power, then you do not have it. You have taken your own power away, then.

Consider this: How many choices or opportunities for change do we get in the course of a day?

Let’s say a moment is equal to a second. Then that would mean that in your waking hours, or 16 hours, there are 57,600 moments where you can make a choice. That is quite a few….

Those are 57,600 opportunities where you can choose to continue along a path or to seek a new one. To use your own judgment or pursue a mentor to guide you. To rely on the same habitual ways of believing and behaving or to pave a new path of being. To value time and use it wisely, or waste it on nonsense. To help yourself or another, or help no one.

Even to reflect on your choices or not, or to write down what you have learned or not are choices you get to make.

The choices are seemingly infinite. Yet there is always a choice.

Of course, it’s easier to blame others and say they are at fault for the setbacks in our lives. And perhaps other people are at fault, to some extent. But complaining, obsessing, or stressing about that does nothing for your progress.

In fact, if you get hung up on how others are at fault, you are the one who has chosen to delay your own life’s progress.

So, of course, we must avoid that and accept our power to choose every moment of every day.

How can you use your power of choice?:

When your time is being wasted, with nothing to gain from it, choose to use it on something more beneficial. Or at least decide to avoid such wasted time in the future.

When you are disrespected and unappreciated, choose to pursue better people to spend your time with.

When you have been treated unjustly, choose to speak up rather than ignore the issue.

When you have made horrible mistakes, choose to learn and improve.

When someone needs help, choose to help if you can.

Choose to see the good in people and situations and not just the bad that is there.

Some of us who do not use our power of choice may not know what we want. In that case, we should reflect on what we believe to be truly important.

For example: Family, Peace, Success, Love, Happiness, Mastery, Knowledge, Awareness, Service, Giving, Truth, and so on. What is most important to you?

Then ask, are your choices helping you to create the life you ultimately want to live? And are you taking advantage of all the choices available to you at every moment in time?

Of course, the point here is not to get overwhelmed with so many choices, as who really needs 57,600 choices? The point is this:

Realize that every moment of your life is a moment of true possibility, where your life can begin to unfold in a new direction of your choosing.

What better time to reflect on that, and to truly understand it and make it a way of life, than the new year, here and now….

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Dance with the Present Moment and Experience Real Life

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life. ― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

In my life, as I try to grasp the present, I’ve found that many triggers jolt us away from the Now.

The triggers are omnipresent, forever invading. We don’t even notice them. Life can quickly become one trigger after another, dragging us away from what life was supposed to be.

Then, when real life happens, we tend to see life itself as a distraction. When really, we couldn’t be more wrong. The things we focused on were typically not real life at all. And the things that distracted us were real life, calling to us.

Real life was the rare human moment that someone wanted to share with us. But when it finally happened, we failed to realize it and shrugged it off.

It was the birds singing, but we were too busy to notice. It was the stranger on the street who was having a bad day and needed help. Real life was the sunrise, sunset, and the stars above. Or the face of your loved one that you hadn’t bothered to truly look at.

But when these things happened, we thought they were the distraction, not real life itself.

The distractions from real life were in the job that we do, where if we ceased to exist, someone else would fill the slot within 48 hours. It was the negative and judgmental words that we yell at ourselves in our minds. It was the worries about the stock market going up or down. It was the concern over the most negative news story of the day.

We thought we were living real life in these times, but we were not in the present moment here. Instead, we were upset about the past or worried about the future or focused on our made-up problems. Or perhaps, we were just distracted by nonsense.

As we become so-called mature and modern adults, we get to a point where whatever it is pulling us into the Now becomes the thing that we wish to avoid. The Now falls into the background. We somehow manage to escape the unescapable.

Adults have escaped from the present as if it were a disaster to be averted. But we weren’t meant to escape the Now. It’s like trying to outrun your shadow. Humans today are disjointed from their own shadow, living in a world of illusion when they become disconnected from the Now.

So why do we seek to escape it if this cannot be done?

The present may be too powerful for us to handle. It is a zone where anything could happen. The plans you had may work, or they may come crashing down. Your feelings may be validated or dismissed. A revolutionary idea may help you find success, cause you to have a massive failure or even both.

But rather than give in to the power of the present moment, we often wish to take power back for ourselves.

Our inflated egos make us want to hold on to the need to control, plan, achieve, and predict.

Some mysterious Now couldn’t possibly be at the reins of this life – no, we mortal and temporal humans feel that we are the ones in power. This is the illusion that we work on maintaining all our lives. Our lives become not life but rather the illusion of one.

I was once driving to work, and I saw a disheveled man with a chaotic, long beard. He was swaying his hands almost like a musical conductor. He seemed to be guiding traffic and buses to go where they were going. This man did not work for the city. He had a wild smile as if he was having the time of his life. Somehow, I understood what was happening. In this man’s mind, he was controlling the universe. He directed the traffic, the pedestrians, and perhaps even the animals. In his mind, he had orchestrated it all.

But of course, they were all doing what they wanted to do, and he was pretending to have made it happen that way. He felt the power and the control but had none.

Sometimes, that feels like the analogy for what humanity has become. We insist on maintaining control over that which is actually out of our hands. We are happy to take the credit when it works in our favor, but any time something goes wrong, it was out of our hands.

Yet, just maybe, things were always out of our hands. I can’t force my heart to beat, but it continues to happen. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it’s because it was never in my control, to begin with.

Maybe we are trying to control a universe that is actually out of our hands.

We find it difficult to let the Now be whatever it will be, to give us whatever it has to give, or to take from us whatever it wishes to take. And so, every day, we are resisting that present moment, as we have made it into the enemy.

We are not in the present moment because we have made it the enemy of our lives. We have succumbed to the triggers all around us.

Someone could spend a lifetime documenting these triggers that lead us away from the present, away from the Now.

When we have scheduled our lives away, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have plans and perceive nothing beyond them, we have resisted the present moment.

When we convince ourselves that we are failures and get stuck in self-pity, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have rejected a chance occurrence just because we did not expect it, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have labeled with language that which words cannot confine, we have resisted the present moment.

When we needed the security of knowing the outcomes of everything we may do, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have insisted on living by the patterns we have always lived by, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have denied our wild, spontaneous, and free side, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have failed to see the beauty in the beautiful, the sadness in the sad, and the wonder in the wonderful, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have gotten lost in thoughts rather than lost in the experience that is life, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have been convinced by false thoughts and ideas that do not stand up to reality, we have resisted the present moment.

When we have confused our temporary selves, emotions, and problems with being more important than the universe, we have resisted the present moment.

We do these things. I do them, you do them, and perhaps everyone I have ever known does them.

Seeing these triggers for what they are can take us even further away from the present, strangely enough. In seeing them, we start to notice them, label them, think about them, and interpret them, and all of this takes us further away from life.

But if we give ourselves to the Now, then there is nothing left to resist, and we become a part of that Now.

We don’t need to put much effort into this, as effort often works against the now. Going with the tides of now is effortless, but because we have resisted this for so long, it may appear to take effort to get there.

The Now is happening to us, whether or not we are ready to take it in and accept that. The power is more in the present than it is in us. We are predicting it, reacting to it, and explaining it, but are we experiencing it fully and living it? That is another matter.

Rather than grasping at the present, which cannot be grasped, it makes more sense to dance with it. We can focus on becoming aware and in sync with real life and strive to find a piece of that now. Even if we can’t have all of it, we can find some of it for ourselves.

The alternative is to live a life outside of the now. What kind of life is that?

Living longer is a focus for many, but it doesn’t mean much if we didn’t actually live those years. What percent of our lives took place in sync with the Now? That may be a more interesting metric to shoot for.

I’m not sure that being in the present is a skill or practice. It may be as simple as letting go of our ego, of our need to control and direct this thing called life. Rather than living the illusion of life, we can let it go and truly live.

Humans do have great power. But how great is that power when our lives are temporary, and every loved one will die? How great is it when everything built will fall, most of our predictions are wrong, and much of our lives occur in the imaginary world of ideas?

Our true power was in our ability to acknowledge the power of the present and to become one with it.

Join me in a never-ending dance with the present moment. That is the goal of this life if there ever was one.

If you are interested in learning more about the Present Moment, you may wish to read 7 Thoughts to Live Your Life By: A Guide to the Happy, Peaceful, & Meaningful Life.