Posted by Paolo Volpara
At www.brianharke.com you can read that “being present is one of the greatest skill sets you can master. If you read about or follow any of the great leaders in life and business, you will find that their ability to be present and focus on matters at hand has led to their success. In the short term, being present will help you to do your work better, to develop better relationships, to make great first impressions and people develop your professional. In the long term, mastering the ability to remain present could help you be more focused, successful, and even healthy”
And no discussion about the value of being present.
The absent are always wrong and the absent minded are dangerous as well. Somebody doing without thinking and without being conscious misses the best of life and it is obstacle to all of us. But there is a difference between being present and ” living the now”.Living the “now” could be just a good, fashionable suggestion from New Wave people anxious to tell you to do what they could not. And anxious to sell products on the idea. The idea of forgetting the past and not worrying about the future may sound inviting, nevertheless it requires, in my opinion, a momentary and voluntary disconnection with the brain.
Mr.Ulrich Tolle (self-rechristened Eckhart presumably after 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart) became a vagrant mystic for a period spending time in park benches without too much thinking. Eventually became a spiritual teacher, author and talk-show guest with extraordinary success coming mostly from his book “The Power of Now”
Mr.Tolle himself recognises that to “live the now” human has to reduce thinking if not stop it tout court. When we live in the moment, we cannot stop thinking. And thinking moves ahead: maybe it is not a-good-quality-thinking but… cogito ergo sum and without thinking I am not.
Most of the thinking is dedicated, in my experience, to understand the moment in order to anticipate what will happen after the now.
As it happens quite often, motorcycling is a good lab, a fertile ground, to test the theory of “living the Now”.
I went out just few days ago on a (for me) new bike ; one if the disappearing petrol burning dinosaurs of super fast, super agile and super fun Sport Bikes.
These are “good teachers” motorcycles, demanding all your attention and rewarding your dedication with joy and permission not-to-die. An intense experience when, pushing to the limits, the current Now could be the last Now.
Try to ride at good speed and try to live the “now”, meaning where you were one single second ago, 50 meters behind your bike, running toward what you did not anticipate.
We live in the future, we project ahead, we try to think of what will happen if. We anticipate and this is why the name of the biking game name is FEAR. This is why we experience fears and anxieties in our life and we are the fear.
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Jorge Luis Borges