All That Matters Is...Now

This post is as much for me, my self, as much it is for the contest at Blogadda.com - sharing thoughts about All That Matters to an individual. So what really matters to me? Had I been mulling about this questions a few months ago, I would have probably said money matters, inner peace matters, appreciation matters, identity matters, friends and family matters. But no, not any more. For now I believe that actually what really really matters is the importance of NOW, the infinite power of present. Now is the key to all other attainments - material and immaterial.

Not long ago, I was one of those people who would probably have become the self appointed leader of any procrastinators group, provided they made an effort. But then making an effort, and that too at the right time never came easily to the likes of us. My dates with deadlines were never honoured, there was always a backlog on my table and and on my mind, and life in general trudged from one pending task to another pending task. Not until I missed a very important and quite expensively booked official flight out of the country. What followed was nothing sort of a domino effect - meeting after meeting cancelled, the itinerary gone for a toss, another flight booked at a even higher rate, plus, all the chaos billed to my paltry account.

And as if this was not enough, (literal) insult was added to injury with long winding emails by the powers that be in the office, about the importance of being  more punctual and err...less dreamy. Well, the aftermath of this catastrophe got me all thinking and analyzing the reason behind my inclination towards procrastination.

I was procrastinating all right - postponing  tasks from mornings to late evenings, from weekdays to weekends, and then seeing busy weekends ahead, further postponing the tasks to Mondays, and then Tuesdays, and thus the vicious circle continued. No wonder I was always in a mad rush to complete pending tasks that kept piling on and on. But now was the time to contemplate and sort out once and for all the menace of procrastination. And so I got down to monitor in intricate detail my thought process, and my routine and in no time I had figured out what caused me to always come up  with the sentences like  - I will do this later, I will do this during the night, I will complete this work over the weekend.

Past and Future, these were the two words that were hampering my present. These two words kept me captive in their worlds most of the time. I was either daydreaming about future or if not that,  I was reminiscing about the past. Author Paulo Coelho's words in his bestseller work Aleph better describes the persistent predicament I was in -

'We human beings have enormous difficulty in focusing on the present; we're always thinking about what we did, about how we could have done it better, about the consequences of our actions, and about why we didn't act as we should have. Or else we think about the future, about what we're going to do tomorrow, what precautions we should take, what dangers await us around the next corner, how to avoid what we don't want and how to get what we have always dreamed of.”

So that's what my self diagnosis was - persistent hovering around the never ending realms of past and future. But know I believe I that I am cured. And a lot of discipline and body and mind control has gone into this new me. A lot of inspiration came from the books too, from the learned men who knew answers to all of humanity's big and small questions. And this reminds of the beautiful quote by Gautam Buddha that inspires us all to appreciate the present - 

'The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment.' 

How simple and yet profound this thought is. And this too has played a significant role in molding me into a new me, one who is more punctual and does not dilly-dally about the tasks at hand. A new me who knows that all that matters is now, the present. 

This post is written as a part of ‘All that Matters‘ contest at BlogAdda.com in association with INK Live 2013.

Photo Courtesy: Google Images