What is a present moment?
Is it now?
… What about now?
… Is now the present moment?
You get the idea.
You see, we are always in the present moment.
The past is dead and the future is hypothetical.
Then why is it that we always try to get out of the ‘now’?
I do it all the time.
Tomorrow I will have a house near the lake or a well-paid job, and then I will be happy.
But, what about now?
Isn’t now the only thing there is?
Am I then, chasing my own tail?
I’m never going to get that satisfaction or peace or whatever that I am craving for
because all I need is right now.
That’s why I love the film Groundhog Day with Bill Murray.
I’ve watched it many times.
But I happened to watch that movie in a lazy afternoon recently.
I realized it was not a cheesy comedy that I always imagined it to be.
It had one of the most important reality-check messages.
There is going to be, obviously a lot of spoilers.
If you haven’t watched Groundhog Day, definitely watch the film and then get back to this video.
Alright, Groundhog Day is a 1993 comedy film starring
Bill Murray and it is directed and co-written by Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin.
Bill Murray plays Phil, a weatherman who is sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event
in a small town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.
He loathes being there.
All he wants is to get out of the town before the supposed snowstorm and he desperately
tries.
But ultimately he fails.
Something happens and he relives the same day, again and again.
He meets the same people, he goes to the same event and it drives him mad.
He gets stuck in the one place he hates the most.
At first he has fun with it.
But slowly he begins to feel the depressing nature of his situation.
No matter what he does he can’t get out.
He is a prisoner of that day.
He even tries to kill himself on several occasions but he wakes in the same bed to the same song.
When he finally realizes that all his attempts to get out of that horrible loop of a day
is futile, he is left with only one option.
To actually embrace his time in that day.
During the process he also realizes that his misery didn’t stem from the fact that he
was trapped in that day, his misery was actually from his own miserable attempts to get out.
Things begin to change after this shift in perspective.
He actually begins to enjoy his time at Punxsutawney.
He listens, he respects, and he uses the repetition of the day to his advantage.
He saves people and makes people’s lives better; he takes up piano lessons, and he
seems genuinely happy.
Initially he tries to get his way with his co-worker by mere manipulation, but after
he starts to embrace the day, the co-worker is attracted to him.
All we have to do is to replace the day with the present moment.
There are several occasions where I felt trapped in certain moments.
I always imagine a blissful future.
“Oh all of this is going to be a distant dream.
I am going to have that perfect video producer job or that great house near the lake, then
everything will be ok.”
I am always unsettled in my present moments, never stopping to acknowledge the beauty of
it.
Even when I am eating I’m not registering the complex and delicious taste of my food,
I’m either watching TV or dreaming about the future or regretting the past while shoving
all the food into my mouth.
Hence the misery.
It’s always rushing and running to get to somewhere.
But when am I going to register the fact that there’s nowhere to go.
I’m already at a place where I want to be.
Everything is right here, right now.
Much like Phil, in Groundhog Day, my misery stems from my desperate attempts to get out
of the moment I am in.
Instead of embracing it, I am trying to run away from it.
The implication of getting caught in the present moment is quite scary.
What if you are so lost in the beauty, patterns and the complexities of the reality around
you that you simply forget to do the things you are supposed to do?
What happens then?
Because I once tried to be consciously present as I went about my day.
But it proved to be an unnerving experience.
Throughout my life, I am doing things out of repetition.
I don’t register the mirror when I brush my teeth or I don’t register the water droplets
falling on me as I take a shower and the sensations that it produces because it’s not a new
thing.
I’ve been doing that since I was born and why should my mind register it?
But something incredible happens if you consciously register your present moment.
When you are in a room pre-occupied with your work, you don’t register any sound.
But when you are no longer pre-occupied with anything and your sole focus is to listening
to even the minute of noises, you begin to hear things.
Suddenly what you thought was a quiet room is actually filled with all kinds of sound.
A dog bark from two blocks away or a slight flickering sounds of the streetlight and the
hum of the air conditioner from an apartment nearby.
A whole new world opens up.
Similarly, when you actually consciously register the present moment, the experience could be
intense.
Your mind registers plenty of new sounds; sensations and beautiful complex patterns
in even the most mundane of things such as a bag and the experience can actually overwhelm
you.
It made me loose my balance.
After awhile I couldn’t do it and I consciously invited thoughts so that I get out of the
present moment.
Just to give you a picture of its intensity, I want to introduce you to Jill Bolte Taylor,
an American neuroanatomist.
She suffered a massive stroke in 1996 at the age of 37.
It took her 8 years to recover.
That painful experience influenced her work as a scientist and a speaker.
In her book ‘My Stroke of Insight – A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey’ she
discusses in detail, the moments followed by the stroke and it involves being extensively
in the present moment and the consequences of it.
In her TED talk she talks about the left and right hemispheres of our brain and their respective
functions.
She explains that our right human hemisphere is all about this moment; it’s all about
right here and right now.
Our right hemisphere thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement
of the body.
Information in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory
systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks
like, what this present moment smells like, tastes like, what it feels like and what it
sounds like.
We are an energy being connected to the energy all around us through the consciousness of
our right hemisphere.
But the brain’s left hemisphere is a very different place.
Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically.
Our left hemisphere is all about the past and all about the future.
Our left hemisphere is designed to take all the enormous collage of the present moment
and start picking out various details and it categorizes and organizes all that information,
associates it with everything in the past and projects all of our possibilities into
the future.
Our left hemisphere thinks in language.
It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects our internal world to our external world.
It’s the voice that says “You gotta buy groceries for tomorrow”.
It is that little voice that says to us “I am”.
Euphoria.
But the euphoria was a part of her stroke and she had no choice in that.
Being in the present moment, in this case was actually a consequence of that stroke.
But can we consciously re create this feeling of peace out of our will?
I think, we can, because, I’ve been in that situation.
It was not as intense as Jill’s experience, but I’ve experienced the quietness of the
left portion of my brain.
Few years ago, one morning, when I woke up, I was completely floored by the beauty of
everything around me.
I felt peaceful.
I felt like I was not in any kind of urgency.
It wasn’t a complete shut down of the left hemisphere.
I still was very aware of my appointments that day.
I knew where I was heading.
But everything on my way was absolutely magnificent.
I was amazed at every single thing that I encountered.
The cloud patterns of the sky, the greenery of the trees, the design of the buildings,
the sound of the traffic, the droplets of the rain; everything seemed new
and exotic.
Even the imperfections of my reality became a work of art.
Since then, I haven’t had that experience and I am craving for it.
I don’t want to get lost in the present moment forever, but I would love to find a balance
between learning from my past and planning for my future and embracing the present.
Last week, this channel hit 100 subscribers.
I know it is not a lot by any means.
But nevertheless it was a personal milestone.
I feel like my work is appreciated and it feels good to know that.
So, thank you so much for supporting me by following this channel.
I have a lot planned for this channel.
So, stay tuned.
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It brings unique perspective to the topic that we discuss.
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