We are killing the present moment every time we relive a memory, wishing it were now. When we are stuck in the past, when we are reliving our childhoods in our minds over and over again, longing for those simple, better days, this is common when we had an idyllic childhood and maybe our lives turned out differently than we expected.
Or we just long for those days that were carefree, free of responsibility, not a care in the world.

If we were to go back to those days and actually look at what made them so great, what we would find is that we were actually present for it.
These were our earliest memories. We weren’t longing for an even younger childhood than our childhood. And there is no age that that needs to stop.

There is a way to embrace that these are the new times.
These are the amazing, exciting, and more challenging levels of the video game.
There may be challenges, but there aren’t worries except the ones we create.

We just keep acting based on what our surroundings call for in the present moment. Sometimes that’s planning for the future. Sometimes it’s looking back with fondness, but not at the expense of missing this one precious moment, this chance to make a new, incredible lifelong memory.

When we take our eye off of this sacred moment and we don’t give it our divine attention, we are missing out on what this brief life has to show us.

We can learn a great amount of wisdom from our younger selves —
to play again,
to be silly,
to do things with no purpose,
to just go to the park and lie in the grass and look at the clouds,
to play games with our friends,
to play with no structure,
to just goof around.

We can make our lives better than our childhood if we just give this moment the attention it deserves.

When we put all of our attention on this moment, in order to always make the best next moment, then we can truly be living in a world with a life that is always exciting and fun, new and interesting, and with no reason to have a worry or care in the world.

That whole cycle of life will happen to us, where we get older and we lose everyone, and we meet new people, and people come and go from our lives. And we can just go on that circle from start to end that we all go on, either always worried about danger around the corner… or we can just enjoy the fact that this circle keeps going on, whether we like it or not.

So we might as well like it.

Life doesn’t get better or worse with age. It gets better or worse depending on how we condition our mind in each moment.

And if we are always cultivating a deep practice of peace and presence, acceptance for this moment, and gratitude for each breath, every moment can be better than the last.
And this can be the greatest moment of your life.

It doesn’t matter what is happening around us.
All that matters is our internal state of being. And that state of being is based on the conditions of our past, how we view what is happening, and choose to respond, whether it is wise and with patience and calm, or stress and panic and agitation.

Many people become their most joyful, gracious, generous, and kind older selves, the wise elder of the community, the source of strength for everyone else.
And some people become very bitter and negative. And that comes from often a lifetime of certainty getting stronger and stronger, a way of being that became deeply ingrained.

But when we are constantly just at a state of relaxation with the present moment, with all of the stuff that comes and goes in our lives, we can deepen that level of relaxation and happiness. And this is how we truly keep going deeper and deeper into the present moment and into the state of expanded awareness that just colors everything we do as joyful and happy and alive.

We just have to make a choice to recognize the things we’ve gotten accustomed to — the expectations and demands we now place on everyone — instead of remembering that when we had no expectations, everything was new and everything was fine.

Now, of course, there are family responsibilities and we have to work and worry — well, we don’t have to worry, we choose to worry.

We know that comparison steals our joy when we compare to what other people have. But we forget that so often we compare ourselves and our lives to our past, to what we expect in the future. And this comparison is the reason we cannot flow with the cycles of time, that we cannot embrace the new phases, the new stages.

We don’t party at nightclubs well into our 90s. There’s just a change that takes place. And we can really embrace all that comes with aging, figuring out how to take care of ourselves and how to keep those joints loose and our muscles strong.

But if we are always comparing to our past as something we long for, something impossible to get, that takes us away from the magic right before our eyes.

There is no reason we have to take for granted everything that is amazing in our lives just because they’ve been with us for a long time. There is no reason we have to lose that joy and playfulness. And just like everything else in life, we welcome it. We welcome the new adventure.

One of the best ways that we can really make space in our new phases and allow for peace and happiness in every phase of life is to always be changing things up a little — trying to stay present and not going into autopilot and just reinforcing this unconscious way of thinking.

A lot of adults struggle with breaking very deep-rooted mental habits. But if we make a constant practice of staying present and open, then we can really accept all the changes we see, both internally and in society.

So it’s just trying not to get too stuck in our ways. And when we are doing the same thing over and over again for decades in our jobs and in our relationships, the more we can be present, not seek and follow that urge to escape into thoughts, the better.

This is the best moment of your life because it is the only moment of your life. And if every day you do something to nourish a positive, present mindset of happiness and relaxation, every day you can have a deeper peace with deeper awareness.

Every day can be the best day of your life.
Every moment can be the best moment, because it doesn’t matter what is happening.
What matters is how relaxed, how at peace you are with what is happening.

And that can grow endlessly.