Another gem from Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, and general spiritual guru.
We think that our lives are a combination of our past, our present and our future, but that’s not strictly true.
The past is the past. It’s gone. All that’s left of it are a few neurones in your brain that can conjure up memories of some parts of it (the past, that is), and usually pretty poorly.
You might be able to use photos and videos to take a peek into the past, but that’s just pixels on a screen and bits on a hard drive or server, it’s not the actual past.
So, it’s impossible to live in the past. It’s impossible to do anything about it. Life was the past, but it’s not the past anymore.
The same can be said for the future. We think we can think about the future, and we think we can visualise the future, but we’re not actually in the future. And we’re not actually thinking about the future. We’re just making pictures in our brains. It’s the same as making a picture about the past. They’re just neurones making pictures. It’s not the actual future.
It can’t be the future because the future doesn’t exist. Nor does the past. One’s gone and the other will never arrive.
All you have, all you’ve ever had, and all you’ll ever have, is right now. This moment. This window. This section of your stream of consciousness is your life.
Life is right now.