What is Absentmindedness and How Can We Live in the Present?

Hi, Steemians!

You are standing on a beautiful beach on a decent summer day. The warmth of the sun against your skin gives you a delightful feeling.

Holding your partner’s hand as they embrace the scenery is wonderfully joyous. You can almost hear her breathe. The whole experience is mesmerizing.

But you are not there. Your body is there. Your eyes, your ears, your hands, and your feet embody you in that place. But your mind is not there. Your mind is racing back and forth between the past and the future, worrying and feeling empty.

You are not taking delight in what is in front of you, because you are going through the ordeal known as absentmindedness.

The feeling of nostalgy is a falsehood that your mind conjures for you to lose your touch of the present. We often feel like our best days were a specific period of time in our past.

But this is wrong and I can prove it to you with one argument. When you go through your memories of the past, are they perfect?

Can you absolutely remember every detail of everything that you felt or happened to you every day?

Obviously not.

Our mind can only remember chunks of information and images and can never have the whole picture. We remember only a small segment of our sensations and not everything that we felt when we were there.

Nostalgia is the memory of days long past which go through a filter and come out as something delightful.

The same could be said about your terrible memories. When you were going through a bad time, everything you experienced and felt wasn’t necessarily terrible, but the passage of time has made you filter out all the good.

Our minds deceive us into seeing something generally, and not with detail. This is basically because we are forgetful. We can only maintain bits and pieces of information scattered through many years of living.

By this definition, your best days could be the ones you are experiencing right now.

Some people worry about the future. They may be experiencing something delightful right now, but their minds are preoccupied by the worry of something that they will have to do in six months.

Both of these mindsets, the nostalgia of the past and the worry of the future, result in a mental state called absentmindedness.

When you are absent-minded, you pay no heed to what you are experiencing right now, and as a result you cannot be grateful for things you have.

Let us skip forward to a couple of years from now. The delightful experience that you are having right now but paying no attention to will ultimately prove to be nostalgic for you in a few years’ time.

All your good days and your bad days will come and pass, and eventually you are left with the same nagging sensation of nostalgia and worry.

Fight absentmindedness by suppressing the unadulterated worry of the future. Do not think about something that you cannot do anything about.

Fight absentmindedness by understanding that your best days are probably right now. It is up to you to decide what to do with them or how to fully experience them and be grateful for everything that you have.

At the end, one could claim that an absent-minded person has not lived at all.

So, you are not merely fighting a mental state, but a whole lifestyle which is false and erroneous at its core.