It’s easy to live our lives caught up in the past (reliving mistakes and regrets or wishing things could go back to how they once were in some magical bygone era) or the future (things we hope for and dream of that may or may not come to pass).

Of course there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the past and/or the future, there’s lessons to be learned and joy to be had in both.

But there is a risk – the risk is that we miss what’s happening today.

It’s easy to become so absorbed with what isn’t that we forget to embrace what is.

I think I get lured by false promises of the past and the future – the past was simpler (apparently) and the future promises certainty and answers and all the things that today lacks.

But when I get there, all I find is another ‘now’, filled with more of the same, plus a little bit extra that I couldn’t have anticipated even if I’d tried.

I’m learning (slowly, painfully and with lots of setbacks and false starts) that the more time I spend in the ‘now’, the easier it becomes to accept what is instead of desperately holding on to what isn’t, and the more I appreciate what I do have instead of focusing on what I don’t have.

Whatever we have, right here and now, may not be perfect, but it’s real.

Memories and dreams are important, but ‘now’ is what really counts.

And I don’t want to spend my life so caught up in memories and dreams that I forget to live in the now that I’ve actually got.

So I’m taking hold of the chaotic, beautiful, powerful, fragile, unknown, uncertain ‘now’ and vowing to live it to the full.

Because that’s where the life is.