When you rush breathlessly from one moment to the next, anticipating another problem or hungering for another pleasure, you miss the beauty and immediacy of the present, which is constantly unfolding before your eyes.

Awakening to the present moment means slowing down and truly arriving in your life as it’s happening. Meditation teaches you to take each moment as it comes—the sounds of traffic, the smell of new clothes, the laughter of children, the worried look on an old woman’s face, the coming and going of your breath.

In fact, as the meditative traditions remind us, awakening to the present moment reveals the truth that only the now exists—the past is just a memory, and the future a fantasy, projected on the movie screen of the mind right now.