Present in this Moment of Life
This photo was something that I came across recently on instagram and it has inspired me to dig a little deeper into the various aspects of this statement that provide me with perspective in the middle of this period in which we are all in the midst of.
There has of course, been debate around as to whether or not John Lennon actually said this, but that isn’t the point of what I wish to explore in my outward thinking. In the midst of this period I have found my own stresses to be more elevated due to certain tiring periodicities in which I have come to be far too engulfed in. I wish to explore this quote’s relationship to these stresses.
Especially in the recent period that we have all been living through I have found myself extremely confined to my bedroom. As my university has cut this semester down in duration, I have had a much more tiring amount of work which at times I am so stressed I don’t see the deadlines as feasible to finish certain assignments by. In the efforts to see positive and uplifting things throughout the month of September I would check the news daily after waking up to find the terrible stories of increased Covid cases and fires ruining lives of people on the west coast. This routine which had mainly come from my curiosity of vaccine progress and led to having anger each day before I even started to think about the already maximally stressful plethora of tasks to complete for school. In making the realization that this “routine” had been feasting on my mental health, I had been at a relatively sad and depressed stage questioning whether I even retained the ability to complete the school tasks and whether I had the “scholarly potential” to finish the degree I had chosen. So where does the quote fit into these aspects I had engrained into my daily life?
The present is a gift; that statement could not be more true than it is in this period. I found throughout these last several weeks that despite all the issues happening in the world around us, and despite all the tribulations of my hours of effort in schoolwork surmounting to marks that made me deliberately depressed, I must remember how special it to be in this position of my life. I had become engrained in the list of things I normally criticize, such as all that things that society demanded of me like being updated with all the Covid-19 news; this very news which never seemed to be new, is what media used to milk the attention of every face in the nation. This directly relates to the people above in the quote that claim “John” had not known what the goal of the assignment was; I have found that I must retain my focus and live in this moment attempting to find harmony and “happiness” if I am to maximize the potential of each moment of my life.
As have discovered, it is important to be informed, but always retain my focus on the beauty of opportunity I have in my life and in this moment. In retaining focus and peace, harmony and happiness follow paving a path where I can look to merely do the best that I can with each passing hour. When it comes to vaccines, unfortunately I don’t have any control over that, so it doesn’t deliberately concern me. In the nature of school assignments and exams, I must aspire and continue to adapt to the best of my ability. Falling short of goals is merely an opportunity to discover how I may structure the following attempt. As Will Smith has said, it is important that we “fail forward”. Let me go forth then, to live in this moment before the next to attempt to “understand life”.
