Ampersand Answers: Stay in the Moment

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

polymath and poet Omar Khayyam 

The Question: 

How can I learn to stay in the moment? 

&mpersand Answers:  

There is a quick and dirty answer to this question, and that is, through the breath. 

Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s teacher used to call it “the gap,” that almost imperceptible ritard, delay, beat, during which you are not breathing in and you are not breathing out. It’s an infinitesimal pause. 

That’s where your happiness lives because that’s, really, where you live, where you’re the most alive. 

Usually when you lose your sense of the moment, one of two things has happened. Either something from your past has hijacked you, and something that could be in your future—note: could, not will—has hijacked you. It also means that whatever you were doing in the moment, a.k.a. the present—a synonym for a gift, you are no longer doing. 

Cutting up chicken for dinner, changing a diaper, painting your masterpiece, reading a trashy novel, folding laundry. Whatever you were doing, you aren’t (really) doing any more. 

Fortunately, the moment and its gifts are as near as breathing, closer than hands and feet: in the gap. Breathe out, find the gap, breathe in, find the gap. If you’ll do this practice, you’ll teach yourself to return to the moment, and leave the past in the past where it belongs, and leave the future in the future which will be when it will be.

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