LIVE IN THE MOMENT, IT IS ALL YOU HAVE

Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear: Comforting Wisdom for Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002) ("The Only Moment We Can Be Alive: I have arrived, I am home / In the here, In the now / I am solid, I am free / In the ultimate, I dwell" "We cannot enjoy life if we spend a lot of time worrying about what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. We worry about tomorrow because we are afraid. If we are afraid all the time, we cannot appreciate that we are alive and can be happy now." "In our daily life, we tend to believe that happiness is only possible in the future. We are always looking for better things, the right conditions to make us happy. We run away from what is happening right in front of us. We try to find things that make us feel more solid, more safe and secure. But we are afraid all the time of what the future will bring. We are afraid we'll lose our jobs, or possessions, the people around us whom we love. So we wait for the magical moment--sometime in the future--when everything will be as we like, as we want it to be." "But life is available only in the present moment. The Buddha said, 'It is possible to live happily in the present moment. It is only moment we have.'" "When you come back to the here and the now, you will recognize the many conditions of happiness that already exist. The practice of mindfulness is the practice of coming back to the here and the now to be in touch deeply with ourselves, with life. We have to train ourselves in order to do this. Even if we are very intelligent and we understand it right away, we still have to train ourselves to live this way. We have to train ourselves to recognize that the conditions for happiness are already here." Id at 99-100.).