...You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live. Now.
This “Spoiler of the present” may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human being the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise….For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.
- Joan Baez
This “Spoiler of the present” may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human being the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been “cleared up” and the future is bright with promise….For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.
- Alan Watts. The Wisdom of Insercurity
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