I once heard the quote “Wherever you are, be there.” Sometimes the hardest place to be is the place you are currently in (and I’m not talking emotionally, I mean literally the physical place where you are even reading these words).

Caught up in school, work and relationships, are bodies seem to be in one place and our minds are caught in a thousand others. I am guilty of sitting, trying to listen to a friend pour her heart out and at the same time be thinking of what I will be doing tomorrow or where I will be after our conversation. It comes to the point where not one word from her mouth did I comprehend or retain. It’s like my mind transcended time and space and landed in tomorrow’s worries and I was nowhere near the life I am currently living.

Is that selfish? Yes. We constantly make lists of things to do, places to go and never take the time to just live the moment. We are living right now, this every second. We are not in tomorrow. Our past has left us behind- so why are we so caught up in everything but the now?

Sitting at work is painfully hard. You count the minutes and seconds till the time when you can leave, but do we ever stop to just live out where we are working? To cherish the fact that we are breathing and capable of working?

It’s not easy. In a world where we are trained to multi-task and rush through everything (to get to what exactly?) it’s hard to sit and relax. During finals, I dream of when there is nothing looming over my head. But when that does happen, when all my paper are written, all my tests are taken- something else will enter the picture that causes my mind to race to the future. It may be a relationship, or it may even be a job opportunity. There will always be something to capture our attention and hold it hostage from living the moment we are in.

So what do we do? Rely again on the promise from God that he holds our tomorrows. Make a conscious (and at times painful) effort to live 100% in the moment that God has given you. It’s hard and it will not be easy, but in the end we may have fewer regrets that we expected.