Where's Your Space?

One of the hardest challenges in life is "staying present." It's easy to talk about, easier to write about, but in essence staying present is the single greatest challenge that any human being can face.

Why? Because, quite simple, staying present is the essence of awareness -- which is the key to transforming your life and letting go of the things that stand in your way (including, of course, YOU!).

What makes this challenge even harder is that it's easy to think that we're "present" when things are great. I mean, when life is smooth, when the weather is nice, when things are flowing, hey, everyone is enlightened. Yet when that temporarily "peaceful" scenario changes -- when the weather changes, when stress comes in, when lack or loss strikes -- the real test of presense is administered...and, indeed, many of us fail.

It's not because we're "bad" -- this is not about morality or ethics. It's about one thing, and one thing only: awareness.

There is awareness, and there is unawareness.

Or, if you want some different terms:

There is presense, and there is unconsciousness.

The challenge of your life -- regardless of what you want, where you're headed, or anything else -- is to be aware.

As Eckhart Tolle says, the nature of life isn't to make you happy -- it's to make you aware.

It's All Small Things

We tend to view life as a few big, notable things surrounded by a bunch of tiny, small things. It's as if we view our lives, paradoxically, like a history book in the making: events surrounded by "everyday" things that really are nothing but the stuff that connects those events together.

However, reality is really nothing like a history book. Reality is deep, deep...and deeper still.

There are no small events in reality. Each event is empowered with the potential to be done with aware grace and presence, or disregarded as just a means to an end; just something "in between" other, more important things.

Each moment of your life (and yes, there's really only one moment, but let's pretend that there are a bunch :) is an invitation for you to live. It's a knock on your door, a hand reaching down, a lamp or candle that is waiting to be lit. YOU have to turn on that light; take that hand; answer that door. After all, it's just an invitation; it's just potential; it becomes activated -- it becomes real -- when you engage the present moment and awaken "into" it.

Remember, you cannot lose the present moment; you can only be lost to the present moment. The present moment is waiting for you -- much, much, much, much more patiently, lovingly and loyally than anyone else in your reality could possibly be -- to wake up.

You don't have to do anything; just wake up into the present.

Wake up into the small, seemingly ordinary moments of your life -- and discover that there are no ordinary moments at all, and indeed, there are no "small things" possible in a universe as infinitely mysterious and incomprehensibly vast as this.