“If you tend to reminisce about good times or relationships you have experienced in the past, you must understand these types of thoughts keep you from fully experiencing the present moment. Ideally, what you need to do is to develop the ability to completely experience whatever it is you’re experiencing at any given time, and then leave it behind. In the words of Fr. Anthony DeMello:
“Don’t carry over experiences from the past. In fact, don’t carry over good experiences from the past either. Learn what it means to experience something fully, then drop it and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one. You’d be traveling with such little baggage that you could pass through the eye of a needle. You’d know what eternal life is, because eternal life is now, in the timeless now.”
Although this may seem like novel advice, it is quite practical, because many of us have a tendency to, as Henry David Thoreau once said, “loiter in winter when it is already spring.” If you are a person who is inclined to focus on good times in the past, please understand that all you are doing by “time-traveling” in this way is wasting thought and feeling energy that could be used in far more constructive ways. If you can begin to put into practice even in a small way what DeMello is recommending, you would most certainly notice an improvement in the quality of your life. You would also come to realize that these are indeed “the good old days.”
Jeff Maziarek, in “Spirituality Simplified”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
