* Why carry the stories of the past with you? * Every moment is a brand-new moment *
Do you occasionally wake up feeling irritable and annoyed, spending the entire day in a grumpy mood, even at the slightest provocation? Your whole day is a mess, nothing seems to go right, and it seems like you're being chased by misfortune. You'll notice: you carry the stories of the past with you.
Two monks on their way to a monastery come to a riverbank where they meet a beautiful woman. The water level is very high, and she is afraid to cross the river. One of the monks takes pity on the woman and carries her across the river. They say goodbye to the woman and continue their journey. However, the other monk, after a while, could not contain his irritation, burst out and berated his companion for hours:
- You forgot our monastic vows! How dare you touch that woman? You have dishonoured our religion and our faith! - he growled loudly.
The scolded monk listened patiently to his companion, until suddenly he spoke softly:
- Brother, I took that woman across the river and put her down. Are you still carrying her?
We tend to carry the burden of our experiences from the previous days. After a bad day, you fall into bed mentally shattered, you wish you could take a long sleep, and the next morning you have no willpower to get up and start a new day. Maybe someone has unintentionally hurt you with a sentence, or touched you emotionally, or someone close to you has not given you the love you expected. Or it could be that you have taken a small inconvenience to heart.
Something happened that shouldn't have happened, that is, life didn't support your expectations and you made it personal. Whatever happened in a short period of time, the story lived on in your mind. You may have grumbled for hours, "Why did this have to happen to me? What did I do wrong?" You may notice: you are not in the present moment, but immersed in a past memory.
The mind does not distinguish between an event that has happened and an imagined event. If an unpleasant story lasted only a few minutes, but you spent hours ruminating over it, then from your mind's point of view the unpleasant event lasted for hours. It poisoned not only your day, but also the day of those around you: that unpleasant story turned into a whole day's worth of stories. If you take a pessimistic, negative attitude to the present moment, it seems that all of life begins to punish you: as if the Universe is conspiring against you. You live so much in your head that you cannot see reality. You are hanging your nose, ploughing the ground, and you don't notice that a stone gets in your way as you walk. You kick it, and the pain returns you to the reality of the present moment for a moment, only to make you even more irritated.
But these new inconveniences are a lesson for you. They teach you to wake up to the fact that you are not present and that you are unconsciously attracting bad luck.
Every day is a new day. Every moment is a new moment: the possibility of a new beginning. Forget your past, don't dwell on it, it's just a dead memory. You cannot change the past, and that is why there is tension within you: you are here, in the present, unable to change something that is in the past, that has already happened. Therefore, you develop stress, anxiety.
Whenever you find yourself dwelling on the unchangeable past, remind yourself, "Dwelling on the past is useless: I cannot change it. I can only do anything in the present moment that will shape the future. The present moment is therefore extremely precious. Every moment contains the seeds of a new beginning. I seize the present moment to rediscover life always fresh and joyful!"
Have a nice day! Smile! And remember: now begins the rest of your life!
Excerpt from the book "The Mysteries of Consciousness” by Ervin Kery