Living Life in the "Now"

How much time do you spend worrying? How much time do you spend thinking about what had already occurred? How much energy does it require to dwell on something that may never occur?
Worrying, is the process of putting energy into an unpredictable outcome that in all probability will not manifest. Think about it. When you worry that something may go wrong, many times these situations don't come to pass. On the other hand, you may find that the things you worry about do come to pass. And why is this, you may ask? When you worry about something, you are giving it attention, giving it energy, per say, thus setting up the process of attraction, possibly manifesting the end result. Worrying is generally related to a negative feeling or thought, so generally the outcome will in all probability be of a negative nature.
In our concept of time being linear, history is the past, obviously. But why do we give events that have happened in our past our attention to the point of distress. Obviously we all don’t do this, but I feel that the mass majority of our species does. The past is the past and there is no changing it. If we had some bad experiences, we need to let them go, as there is nothing going to change about what has been. We need to have a good look at these experiences, and instead of looking at the bad or negative aspects of the experiences, we need to look at it from a different perspective. Look at the experience with a positive outlook and try to find the positive lesson that is hidden in the experience, remember the lesson, and move on. Remembering the positive lesson is easier to swallow than the experience. Finding the positive lesson will ease the experience and make it easier to let go, but it may have to require getting the ego out of the way.

To get the ego out of the way, my observations are that you need to be comfortable with being humble. Humility is a part of learning. If you have a big ego, you may as well be a know it all. And if you are going to be a know it all, then you must be right all the time. And if you're right all the time, you can't possibly be happy because you will always be defending yourself. That's just my veiw.

Getting back to the subject of dwelling on the past, any time and energy that we give events that are done and gone, is time and energy that is taken away from our current events that we are experiencing at this moment. When our attention is taken away by our past, and by worrying about the future, opportunities can pass us by in the present because our attention is not given to our goals.

Ahhh!, we need goals. Without goals, we have too much time to dwell on things that haven’t been working for us. We have too much time to worry about what’s going to happen and probably nothing good will happen, because we haven’t given our future a positive focus put forth by a goal.

Having a goal will generally turn worry into more of a worthy challenge if we shift our perception to focusing on how we can take steps to achieving our goals. Take action, because if you just have an intention or a goal, we can do all the positive thinking that we want, but we will probably have a slim to none chance of achieving them. There is an old saying:

God only helps those that help themselves.

Here is another one I like:

Things come to those that wait
But I heard this as well, which makes sense to me:
But only what is left over by those that hustle.

Even if we only do one thing a day to bring us closer to our goal, then the universe will start to help us achieve them. Our new heightened awareness, because of the focus of our goal, will allow ourselves to be more perceptive to arising opportunities to help us achieve our goals.

So bringing ourselves into the now, or the present moment, we can put our energy into advancing our lives in a positive manner, being aware consciously the direction of our thoughts and energies. Practicing through meditation will make bringing yourself into the present moment second nature once we have convinced the subconscious mind that this is the new regime. Worrying and dwelling on the past are just non beneficial habits that we had acquired through our past experiences. By shifting our perception into a positive manner and learning the hidden lessons in our experiences, we can more readily move forward in life without the exhaustive effort that is unnecessarily put into things that cannot be changed and that are unpredictable.