How many of us spend more time online, more time offline into dream space even when fully awake? Do you ever find your kind just wanders off whilst you attend to a mundane chore? How many times do we check out of our lives? Many than we care to think of for sure.
For most of us, life is anything but perfect as it is. We are full of wants needs desires what ifs maybes and no no. We are wanting a life that is a slightly or exponentially better than what we have right now. Our life as it is never seems to satiate. There’s always a “if only”.
On the other hand when we fully live our lives embracing all of them it, fully engaged and present most of the time, chances are you won’t even get a second to ponder on a what if. Life is just so darn good you simply can’t check out of it. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful, it’s sublime. Yes you might have some off days but these just don’t get you off your tracks. You are content with what is. You are living right now and are engaged with the right now.
Most of us struggle with having an engaged presence with life. Why? The mind. Our mind loves history. And it also loves novelty. We want the comfort of what we know so we attract that which is known whether that is good bad or ugly! Similarly, we also seek what is new and promises a “high” boosting our feel good hormones and neurotransmitters.
It is the old that will keep us locked in a pattern; and the new that will keep us seeking a new shade of the same colour. What we don’t see is that neither old nor new are maintaining a sense of being fully there in our day to day life. When we are checked in with what’s happening, and immersed in it, fully participating in life it’s rigamarole including engaging with community society, very rarely can we not be there.
So, what keeps us checked out of life?
When we have been deprived of the foundations at childhood for example, we will continually seek out the old to give us an opportunity to work that out in our heads. A rewrite of the script. The old forms our wired belief systems and conditioning. Unless we can disengage with the old we cannot engage with the now.
Without the foundation fully affixed and the building of us being wonky, we will continually seek something new. The new is a bit like getting excited which then gives us a zing to keep living.
We have formed “coping” mechanisms to live, when living is not in the NOW.
Living in the now is simply without the old and new. There is nothing there but a full participation of you in your life as it is without a desire to change it but rather a totality of acceptance of things as they are.
When we live offline, we seek the satisfaction of living online. We still want to live and so we form ways of continuing with life compromising our present.
Can you give yourself an honest check in and say you are fully present in your life or are you offline?