"It is always now
i actually want to talk
today about death
now most of us do our best to not to think about death
but there's always part of our minds that knows
this cant go on forever
part of us always knows
they were just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from being starkly
reminded
with the fact of our own mortality
or of those closest to us.
Now i'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form
you must know how uncanny it is
to suddenly
be thrown out of the normal course of your life
and just be given the full time job of not dying
or caring for someone who is.
But the one thing people tend to realize
at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time
when life was normal
and it's not just what they, it's not just what they did with their time, it's not just
that they
spent too much time working or or compulsively checking email
it's that they cared about the wrong things
they regret what they cared about
their attention was bound up in petty concerns
year after year
when life was normal
and this is a paradox of course because
we all know
this epiphany is coming
i mean, don't you know this is coming?
don't you know there's going to come a day
when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die
and you'll look back
at the kinds of things that captured your attention
and you'll think, "what, what was I doing?"
you know this, and yet if you're like most people,
you'll spend most of your time in life
tacitly presuming you'll live forever
it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time
or bickering with your spouse
I mean this, these things only makes sense
in light of eternity
there better be a heaven if we're gonna waste our time like that
there are ways to
really live in the present moment
what what's the alternative?
it is always now
however much you feel you may need to plan for the future
to anticipate it, to mitigate the risks,
the reality of your life is now
this may sound trite
but it's the truth
it's not quite true as a matter of physics, in fact there is no now
that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk about an event
being simultaneously
occurring here and one
at the same moment occurring in Andromeda
the truth is, now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology because
we know that inputs to the brain
come at different moments and that consciousness is built upon layers
of inputs whose timing to have to be different
are conscious awareness of the present moment is
in some relevant sense already a memory
but as a matter of conscious experience
the reality of your life
is always now
and i think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in
fact i think there's probably nothing more important to understand
about your mind than that
if you want to be happy
the past is a memory
it's a thought
arising in the present
the future is merely anticipated, it is another thought
arising now
what we truly have
is this moment
and this
and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth
repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it,
and the horror
is that we succeed
we we've managed to
never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we
are we are
continually hoping to become happy in the future
and the future never arrives
even when we think we're in the present moment we're, we're in very
subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder
anticipating what's coming next
we're always solving a problem
and it's possible to simply drop your problem
if only for a moment
and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present
this is not a matter of new information
or more information, it requires a change in attitude
it requires a change in the attentiveness you pay
to your experience in the present moment "
Part of script adopted from Sam Harris Lecture
Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment
