 But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time when life was normal It's not just what they it's not just what they did with their time It's not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email Is it that they cared about the wrong things? They regret what they cared about Their attention was bound up in petty concerns The year after year When life was normal and this is a paradox of course because we all know this epiphany is coming But don't you know this is coming? Don't you know that there's gonna come a day? When you'll be sick or someone close to you will die and you'll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention Because even if you live to be a hundred They're just not that many days in life It is always now However much you feel you may need to plan for the future to anticipate it to mitigate risks The reality of your life is now our conscious awareness of the present moment is in some relevant sense already a memory But as a matter of conscious experience the reality of your life Is always now And I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind In fact, I think there's probably nothing more important to understand About your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world past is a memory It's a thought arising in the present The future is merely anticipated it is another thought Arising now what we truly have is this moment And this and and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth repudiating it fleeing it overlooking it And and the the horror is that we succeed we managed to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are we are Continually hoping to become happy in the future and the future never arrives Even when we think we're in the present moment we're in very subtle ways always looking over its shoulder Anticipating what's coming next We're always solving a problem And it's possible to simply drop your problem If only for a moment and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present There are more connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue than stars and our galaxy And yet our inner experience offers absolutely no clue We're subjectively unaware of most of what our minds are doing And yet when we think about what what matters What matters is consciousness and its contents Consciousness is everything Our experience of the world the experience of those we care about is a matter of consciousness and its contents So so whatever the origins of consciousness That the most important question for us is how can we truly be fulfilled in life? How can we create lives? That are truly worth living Given that these lives The frame we put around the present moment is important and largely determines our experience of it But it seems possible in fact to experience life more nakedly than this to experience it without an obvious frame To pay attention to the present moment closely enough so that you're not doing anything to it Now you might feel that your consciousness is in your head or behind your face But as a matter of experience These are just more sensations arising in consciousness They're the only evidence of your face in head is as sensation arising in consciousness At this moment or whatever you can possibly notice in your body and your mind in the world has only one place to appear in your conscious experience Now I'm not saying this is all just a dream But as a neurological matter, it is very much like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained By inputs from the external world And the dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world But your mind is all you have Okay, it's all you've ever had It's all you have to offer other people. We are all trying to find a path Back to the present moment and good enough reason to just be happier If you're constantly ruminating About what you just did or what you should have done or what you would have done if you if you only had the chance You will miss your life Hey, you'll fail to connect with it. You'll fail to connect with other people Okay, but being the mere hostage of the next thought that comes careening into consciousness isn't useful So if there's an antidote to the fear of death and the experience of loss It's compatible with reason I Think it's to be found here. Life is pretty obvious. We are we are constantly a culture and form relationships But beyond matters of mere survival We're constantly trying to create and repair a world that our mind