Stay with me. Stay with me now. Stay in this moment.

Okay you just left…come back. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Feet on the floor. Let your roots stretch deep into the ground and your branches into the sky. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Come back. Here. Now. This moment.

My self talk lately has been changing. In fact, I would say that my self talk…is completely centered around a place where I in fact…don’t talk. It’s about coming back to this moment. When I start to wander off into the past or race my mind into the future, I have to bring it all back. I have to bring things back to this moment.

One of my greatest challenges with my personality is in fact staying here in this moment. I love getting distracted and trying to entertain myself in many ways. I am literally working with unhooking myself from technology as much as I can when I am doing the things I need to be doing. Sitting here writing has been a challenge sometimes because I am often tempted to click or look away from the page.

But I keep bringing myself back.

I keep rooting myself deeper into the ground in this moment.

I remember times of deep frustration in doing something fun but having my mind be so focused on the things that I thought I needed to be doing that I forgot to experience what I was going through. I would be with people but I actually wouldn’t be with them. This would cause deep frustration and would even further prevent myself from being there.

I have noticed this trend and am working on bringing myself back to “this moment” as often as I can.

When you are living in the now, you are actually living in a complete state of mystery and uncertainty. Ah yes, uncertainty…how did I used to hate you. An old mind of mine used to say…”If you don’t know what is going to happen, you leave yourself wide open to having things happen to you.” This leads me to something I was told this past week.

Life is just happening…it’s not happening to you.

If you get into your car and drive down to the freeway…and there’s traffic…everyone didn’t plan that out to ruin your day. It just is what it is. Life is just happening and you are a participant in it. The traffic didn’t happen to you.

But now, in that state of mystery and uncertainty, I am allowing myself to be open to all possibilities. Yes, some of them will be painful and hard to deal with…but as I think back to all of the times that I have experienced in my life, I wonder how pinched I was in terms of shutting off life’s incredibly amazing flows of energy into myself. I tried to block as much I could from happening and therefore blocked out all of the positive things as well.

Yikes.

So I am here now, back again in pure awe of the sound of the keys tapping away on the computer. It’s amazing how satisfying that sound is. Wonder how long it has been since I’ve really heard that sound?

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project