I have a viewpoint and an attitude of loving this moment and wanting for nothing else. Because I noticed a while ago that when you want something that is not happening right now, you suffer. And I didn’t want to suffer, so I cultivated this mindset of making whatever happens in my life, in this moment, exactly what I want.

I used to want to be the richest guy in the world. But today, this couch I’m sitting on  while typing this is what I want the most. And we can all do that. We can all cultivate this practice of loving exactly what is happening, as if we had chosen it. And we naturally feel immense gratitude and joy, and it is effortless.

When I was younger, I went to a private school, and most of the kids had a lot more money than we did. And I wanted what they had, and I was ashamed of my family’s house. And of course, we were lucky to have a house, and it was a beautiful house. But we have that comparison. And I think that’s what planted the seeds in my mind, to realize that this longing, this chasing after things, is a sure way to misery.

And so, what I realized is: every moment can be the greatest moment of our lives. Even when we’re working towards our dreams, we don’t have to look back and think fondly of those times when we were scraping by or living in a small apartment. We can do it during the journey. And we can be so grateful for being on the journey.

It doesn’t matter where we are on the journey. It doesn’t matter what path we’ve taken. We can be so grateful that life is a journey; it is an adventure.

And no adventure is all easy. That would be a terrible movie where everything just goes well. So we need to look at our lives like this movie, because it is a movie. It is the movie that we are watching. It is the virtual reality we’re inside.

And nobody pays to go see a movie where a person’s just laying in a field, staring at the clouds, and having a peaceful, beautiful time for two hours. Something happens. We have to have that drama, that excitement. And life surely gives us plenty of opportunities to witness the greatest drama ever told.

Just like in a movie, the second we get lost in thoughts, we miss it. So we need to start paying attention to our life like it’s a movie, like it’s the most important, greatest movie, because it is. It’s 3D, hyper-realistic, surround sound, smell, vision, taste. The senses are exploding with life. And too often, we settle for that grainy, two-dimensional, low-resolution image in our mind of memory.

So simply start to practice just looking at your life like a movie, like the movie starring you. Embrace the drama. Embrace tragedy, like Shakespeare’s greatest plays that we’ve told for hundreds of years. And to miss that movie because we’re in our head, in our memories, in our imaginations of the future, is like going to a play and being on our phones the whole time.

Don’t try to stop the thoughts or stop the memories. Instead, start paying attention to the movie of life unfolding before your eyes.

I think a lot of us, through various times in our lives, will have those ups and downs. We will face breakups, job loss, financial insecurity, our health, and so it’s very easy to get caught in the trap of nostalgia, where we spend a great deal of time looking back on the “better” times, which typically ends up making us suffer in the present.

We long for those times of excitement or romance, and those wonderful times that we had in our lives, whether they were in young adulthood or in our childhood. I certainly have gone on that roller coaster — the ups and downs — that is inevitable in everyone’s life, where we find romance, we lose it. We have a great job, and we decide to strike out on our own and face that uncertainty.

And the way to cope with this is to discover that anything that happens in the present moment is so much better than anything that happened in the past, or that may happen in the future.

When we are fully present, this moment naturally becomes the greatest moment of our life. And truly, it is all there is. There is only this moment. Our memory of the past, our imagination of the future, only robs us of this perfect, pleasant, peaceful moment.

There are a lot of great moments from my past—  Disney World trips, trips to Europe, camping trips. These are all wonderful memories, and yet I never think about them unless it’s brought up, as in this case right here.

I have made a practice of leaving the past in the past. Sometimes I’ll plan for the future, but it’ll be a present-moment activity where I’m laying out goals or plans, and then I set them aside, and I focus on this moment and how to bring it about.

This moment is as joyful as we choose to make it. It is as exciting as we can be present for it. This is where all the magic happens.

Most of the time, when we want to escape the present moment, we’re not in it. We are in our head. We are in our thoughts about the present moment, which tends to be negative, if it’s something we’re trying to escape. We are consumed by the emotions those thoughts create.

But when we can be truly present, unless we’re being tortured, the present moment is peaceful, and pleasant, and it truly is perfect. Because the universe is perfect, even though we may wish for something to be different.

It had to be this way, in order for us to work to change it, or to learn that something we were doing wasn’t right, or to let go of our expectations and our demands on the universe, and to let the universe show us what it wants to show us.

A lot of times, when we are feeling nostalgic, longing for a past, longing for a person who used to be in our lives, we are thinking about good times, positive memories. And it is creating this disconnect in our lives because we are longing for it, and we can’t get it. So that creates a great deal of suffering.

But what we have to ask ourselves is: Who is listening to these thoughts?

Because there is the mind, there are those thoughts that pop up into our mind, that then create an emotion in our body. But the thoughts come from the mind. But where is that awareness coming from, that pays attention, that believes those thoughts, and that allows our focus to become absorbed by those memories and thoughts?

Life is too short to miss a single moment. The more present we are, the more we fully live. One year can be like a hundred years, if we are fully present for every single moment.

And this is how we live a truly great and full life. It’s not about the cars and the houses. It’s about the presence.