Quarter Century Clarity

As I sit in my family’s small fenced yard in a New Jersey suburbia, I constantly feel a strong desire to be back on trail. To be back in a seemingly endless forest surrounded only by nature and what I hold on my back. I recently returned from a long distance backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail that lasted 7 weeks, and 571 miles. It was a great experience for me at the time, and an even more amazing experience for me to look back on now.

My present moment holds a very similarly beautiful nature experience that I experienced on trail. There are pretty trees surrounding me, squirrels, birds, and deer running around, and yet I ignore it all and ask for “more”. I look into my past and seek to relive a wonderful experience, and by doing so I fail to see that I am still living in one right now.

The only reason my experience on trail felt so amazing was because I was present during much of it. And if you had asked me how my experience was while I was still on trail, depending on the day, I may not have even said it was that great at all. Our memories are funny like that. We fail to remember all the hardships and challenges that we endured in these “amazing” past experiences and only focus on the positive outcomes and interesting moments. It is this fact that causes me to now devote my entire focus throughout each day to living in the present moment, in a state of non-thinking and flow.

In the book, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”, by Joseph Nguyen (which I highly recommend), Nguyen makes a strong distinction between thoughts and thinking. Thoughts arrive to us randomly, often in moments of non-thinking and boredom, while thinking is our active analysis and intellectualization of a thought. Thoughts come and go, while thinking is us strongly grabbing at a thought and holding on to it. Thoughts are a natural flow, thinking is an unnatural forcing of analysis that consumes our headspace, and in turn, is the root cause of our suffering. Those who meditate and allow themselves to fall into the present moment know just how freeing and joyful being in a state of non-thinking is.

To truly experience, and so to truly live, one must be in the present moment in a state of non-thinking. If one is always lost in thought, in a dream-like trance almost equivalent to sleeping, I’d argue that they are not really living at all. To truly experience the world, to be filled with peace, love, and joy, we must ground ourselves in the present moment and recognize that the only real experience is the here and now. No past or future memory is worth dwelling on for long, for to actively think about our memories is to cut ourselves off from the current experience, and in a sense “die” for a moment.

“I shall not die. I shall live in the land of the living.” – Matisyahu