Do not belong to the dawns of the past but to the noons of the future…

Ever wondered ‘What if I would have taken a different route?’ or ‘If only I had done something differently? I have. I most definitely have and I am definitely sure almost every adolescent, adult, and elderly have had this thought once at least.

Quoting Oprah Winfrey, a woman worth our inspiration,

“Living in the moment means letting go of the past and not waiting for the future. It means living your life consciously, aware that each moment you breathe is a gift.”

The present makes us exist in a certain place. Although we sometimes underestimate the present, everything we do in the present moment will be our personal inheritance. Living in the present allows you to build a whole world that will then become your legacy. Living in the present implies being aware of each situation and finding our eternity in every single moment.

People who are standing on the platform watching the train of time rush by and looking for places outside of the island of opportunities lying below their feet are missing life. They are letting every greatest moment they could have had gone by. But there are no other places, though. There is no other life but this one.

The present is ephemeral and thinking intensely about an unknown future or our troubling past may cause it to slip out of our hands. To be able to truly appreciate life and its challenges, we have to first acknowledge that life is now. The present is so transient that this line I just finished is already part of our past. The future, on the other hand, is what we project when we think about what we’ll be doing on the weekend instead of focusing our whole being on what’s before us. The present moment is the only time we can modify our actions and decisions. Just staying in the present and making wise decisions in the hope of a beautiful future is enough to not belong to the past dawns but to the noons of the future.

Most of us are prisoners of our past. We are so caught up in figuring out where we went wrong that we hardly appreciate the present. We have to remember that if we stare too much into the abyss that is the past, we will trip over our present and never reach our future. The past is to be learned from but not lived in. We look back to claim the embers from glowing experiences but not the ashes. And when we have learned what we need to learn and have brought with us the best that we have experienced, then we look ahead and remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Wise are the ones who flavor the future with some salt from the past because becoming dust is no threat to the phoenix born from the ash.

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones trap us in a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are and what we can be.

Concluding, I can only say… It’s true! It is true that we have all been hurt in our lives. Quite a bit. But it's also true that we have loved, and been loved. and that carries a weight of its own. A greater weight, in my opinion. It's like that pie chart. In the end, we’ll look back on our lives and see that the greatest piece of it was love. The problems, the regrets, the sadness... those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny pieces.

Jay Asher, author of Thirteen Reasons Why, according to me, may just have figured out the secret to happiness.

“You can’t stop the future; you cannot rewind the past; the only way to learn the secret is to press play”.