Living in the present - by Anne, the president of HF No.1 TMC

[jimmy.chen]

Living in the Present

One day when I woke up in the morning last month, my mum told me that
there were several policemen standing behind our building. Since we
had no idea about what happened, we guessed that maybe a crime of
burglary. We didn’t pay much attention on that.

However, when I came back in the afternoon, I found one ambulance and
two police cars stopping in the yard. My parents told that a young
mother hang herself in the morning, leaving a one-hundred-day old baby
behind.

Everyone may pose the question, why did she kill herself? She just had
a lovely baby! Someone said because of puerperal melancholia (产后抑郁症).
Why she had this disease?
No one can show me the answer.

All of us are sitting on a speedy train. The destination of the train
is death. Life is a journey to death. Therefore, we are all passengers
to this life. Death is our end. However, people may ask, if you say
death is end, maybe the end is another kind of beginning? Well, I
don’t know. But I can tell you Buddhism believes that death is the
beginning of another life. For all of our passengers, the most
important thing is not about the other life. It is about this life,
about present.

Living in the present.

What is living in the present?
Buddha said when you are sleeping, you sleep; when you are eating, you
eat. That is living in the present.
We are in the club now to have a meeting. If you listen to me
carefully, you are living in the present. If you think about your
homework you haven’t finished, your kids you need to pick up in the
kindergarten, the content of your dinner tonight, the stocks you need
to buy or sale on Monday morning or you worry about your presentation
on next Sunday, you are not living in the present.

Most people are living in the past, or living in the future. But they
are never living in the present.
The 31-year old mother who killed herself couldn’t step out of her bad
time. The only way out is to kill herself. She did not want to take
her responsibility to care about her three-month old baby, because she
closed her eyes to her present. She was living in the past.

If you had a fight with your boy friend or girl friend last night, you
are still angry about that today. You are living in the past.

Some people are living in the future. They worry about their mortgage
due time, bank savings, job maintenance, and their relations with boy
friends or girl friends. They seldom have full attention on the
present, on this moment. They are living in their imaginations, living
in their anxieties and living in their uncertainties. However, worry
doesn’t get things arranged, sometimes, the anxiety make things worse.
If you do not face your present, you don’t have this moment, how can
you have next moment, let alone the future.

Don’t waste your time on living in the past and the future.

Living in the present means do not shed tears on the past, do not
worry about future.
Do not shed tears on the past is not to ask you to totally forget
about the past. Past time is your stories, is your experience, is your
history. They are already part of you. You can’t cut them off from
you. However, you are still changing, you will never come back to the
original yourself. Do not shed tear means do not feel guilty or
shameful about the past time. You can’t change the history. But you
can face it and learn from it in order to step forward bravely.
Do not worry about the future doesn’t mean think nothing about future.
You can still make plans and set your schedules. You can also prepare
for any emergency mentally, physically and technically. But just do
not worry about all the things that haven’t happened.

Face your history rationally, logically, you will know more about
yourself. Make plans for you future carefully, you will find a smooth
path. But please remember, living in the present, feel the moment,
treasure what you have right now, take the responsibility that is on
your shoulder. Present is the extension of your past and the beginning
of your future.

If you do not feel shameful about the past, do not feel anxious about
the future, you can focus on the present. You are living in the
present happily.