I recently watched this video from Apostolos on the Design Collector Feed. Apart from being a visually stunning piece of work, the video also talks about a very important, if not the most important thing that each and everyone of us should never forget – to live in the moment and be fully present in the NOW.
Before I go further, request you to take the 3 minutes and 47 seconds to watch and listen to the video first.
Splendor of Existence from Apostolos Stefanopoulos on Vimeo.
Its that time of the year, when we are either reflecting on what we did well or did not do well in the past year or contemplating what we would like to do in the year ahead. While it is important or even critical to do this exercise of reflection and contemplation, it is equally important, if not vastly more, to ensure that we do not end up living either in the past or in the future.
The Keystone Habit
Charles Duhigg, in his book “The Power of Habit” talks about the importance of Keystone Habits. These are habits or routines, that have a positive cascading impact on most of your other habits. If you only have the time to work on and improve one single habit, it would be wise to identify a keystone habit in your life and work on that one habit.
The habit of staying in the NOW is one such habit. If we just work on improving on this one aspect of our behaviour, we have the potential to bring in a positive cascading impact on our lives, by allowing to build strong relationships, by allowing us to spot opportunities around us and most of all, by allowing us to truly and fully enjoy our time here in this journey called life.
I know for sure that this is something that I am guilty of not doing. I have the habit of constantly thinking of something and being lost in thought – either in the past or in the future. My wife has pointed this out to me many a times and has been the cause of a lot of not so comfortable discussions between the two of us.
What this video did was to remind me of this habit and also poignantly point out and drive home the importance of building this habit of being in the NOW.
The Best Gift Possible:
As they say, the best gift that one could give to oneself is to develop the ability to be present in the present, almost always. The best gift that one could give someone else is our complete, undivided attention.
Starting right now, I publicly commit to learning to and building the keystone habit of being present in the present and embrace “NOWNESS”. I know that by making this commitment in public, I am allowing my wife, my friends, colleagues and my readers to hold me accountable to this behaviour and help me on my journey to embrace “NOWNESS”.
I hope that some of you, who are also afflicted by the same challenge that I have regarding staying constantly distracted, also, make this commitment to embracing #NowNess.
This is even more critical if you are a leader, because, then it is not just you and your life that we would be impacted by this commitment, but the lives of every single soul that you lead will be positively impacted by your commitment to #NowNess.
[bctt tweet=”Lets go experience the wonder that is, Our Life on this Beautiful Universe.. ” username=”rmukeshgupta”]
