The Stream of Bliss
My choice of drink today is coffee, brewed at home in the comfort of my apartment. The weather has been sizzling hot today and so I'm happy to stay indoors in the company of my books and begin my weekly soliloquy in cyberspace...
We can recollect the past, and speculate on the future, but all these thinking processes happen here and now. I'm writing these lines here. Now. You are reading these lines here, and now. In other words, you can never be elsewhere other than here and now.
You can plan to go somewhere else in the future based on information you've gathered in the past. Planning is an activity that happens now. And you are digesting information you've read on the internet about cheap flight tickets and you're mentally checking if you have any prior commitments on a specific date so that you can decide on going on a trip to somewhere at a specific time.
When you think of an upcoming holiday, you are filled with excitement and anticipation. Maybe you'll also feel a bit frustrated that you still have to slog through another month of boring work, before you can enjoy your holiday. So the thought of the future is pleasure (the anticipation of an upcoming holiday) and pain (the need to endure more tiring work).
And when you think back of past holidays, you recollect happy times in the past which you had experienced the pleasure of going to new places and spending quality time with loved ones. But they are now just happy memories, and the fact that they are only memories also makes you sad, because you cannot relive them again. They're gone. Circumstances have changed. Such an opportunity may not arise again in the future. There's the pleasure of recollection and the pain of loss.
Think now, if you do not have thoughts of the past or the future, will you still have pleasure and pain? If you never have to worry about the future, nor regret the past, would you not be a happier person? Take this moment for instance--you are alright now, aren't you?
You're are alive now, living and breathing. Celebrate it. It only takes a moment to do so. And another moment appears. Hey you are still alive! What a miracle! Let's celebrate it! Let's claim this moment and revel it its magic. It's pristine, it's fresh and then...it's gone! But hey...here's yet another moment...pristine, fresh and alive. You never seem to run out of it!
A moment is too short for you to worry about anything. You have no obstacles to overcome, nor unpleasantness to avoid. Hence there's no such thing as stress nor regret when you see things as they are, in this moment alone. And life can simply be a collection of moments like these. When you sum them all up, they too coalesce into a single moment---your entire life in a flash.
Stress and worry only makes sense in macro-time--when you are not conscious of each individual moment but are only aware of large swatches of time, and you end up labelling them painful or pleasurable. Micro-time is always blissful. To experience micro-time, you'll need to be mindfully present. So be mindful and be present every moment. When you do so, life is a continuous stream of bliss.