Take Time to Love, Be, Enjoy, Think, Feel…

The best time of your life is the present. Yesterday is over. The future does not even exist. Go get some fresh air, breathe, open up. Gift yourself time to love others but also time to love yourself in the way you deserve.

Take time to think and feel the warm touch of this present day. When it’s over, it will never return.

William James, psychologist and philosopher, who specializes in mental health, wrote about the perception of time. He explains that as we grow older, we experience the clear sensation of time going by faster. Time turns into something fleeting, peculiar, even scary.

According to James, this phenomenon is due to the fact that as we grow older, we no longer experience memorable moments as we did in our younger years. Years in which everything was fresh, exciting and new (the first love, that trip, that job, the new house, the new baby…). Like it or not, life turns into a routine. Our daily life turns into a slow and cyclical experience. We do, see and encounter the same events and situations over and over again.

Little by little, the brain, lacking new stimulus, enters into a destructive spiral, in which its neuro-chemistry changes, and with it, memory starts to fail and time perception becomes inconsistent.This could be avoided by continuously exposing ourselves to new experiences.

It is all about changing routines. All about stepping out of our existential fog. Living in the present and nourishing it with meaningful events. It  is easier to do than you think.

We encourage you to reflect on it.

Your brain has a weird perception of time

All of us have heard the concept of mindfulness. Its used to help manage attention and accept the present. Empowering the individual to act in creative ways,  in tune with his/her own values.

It is not as easy to put it  into practice as it seems. Even outside the clinical realm. Many individuals start to practice mindfulness, realizing shortly after, it is not suitable to them. Methods of the practice that can neither be integrated nor maximized.

The reason behind this is that our brain has a very strange concept of time, or what we know as the present. In the book “The Power of Fifty Bits” , its author, Bob Nease , a scientists and engineer, with an attraction to the mysteries of the human mind, explains our brain’s predisposition to shift its attention and not to concentrate on one concrete aspect or on a single point of interest. Our instincts and  senses do not understand the concept of present, future or past, only survival.

The human mind lives in a constant auto pilot state. It  focuses on several stimuli at a time with the single objective: process risks. All to keep us safe.  It is good to train the mind and convince it that “everything is alright”, that “everything is calm”.

If we declutter the branches of our mental forest, we would be able to find our roots.

Learn to synchronize with the present

We  often hear the phrase “stop our clocks, step out of your routine and dare to live the here and now”. This classic self-help book phrase has many undertones. We can not escape from our routines completely as we are bound to fulfill schedules  and accomplish integral tasks that are part of the engine that propels and shape our lives.

Learn how to synchronize ourselves to the present in an authentic way. Psychologist  Zygmund Baumant describes today’s society as a liquid entity in which nothing lasts, in which everything is either discarded or changed.

Multitasking, the art of doing more than one thing at the same time,  and the people pleasing mentality have turned us into erratic individuals without real balance: the present, the here and now .

Let’s learn to synchronize our needs with our moral obligations, leisure with chores. That way we will shape a happy life. Free of fears, a present free of past regrets and of the anxiety of the future. Let us give to those we love our most valuable possession, that one we can neither sell nor buy: TIME.