If you're new here, check out the Best of Balanced Life Center and be sure to subscribe to receive the latest updates via email or RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A friend once drew 2 points on a piece of paper and asked me, “What is the shortest distance between these 2 points?” Being the scientific genius that I am, I said, “A straight line.”

He then folded the paper with the 2 points over each other and replied, “The shortest distance is here and now.”

I’m reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and I’m at the point where he’s explaining that the only point in time is now. Intellectually that is a simple concept to grasp. If I ask you what time it is, you might look at your watch and tell me 8:16am, but really, what time is it? It is now. If I ask you 15 minutes from 8:16am, it will still be now. Really getting it though, is another matter.

We are so attached to the concept of time that even when we speak of self awareness and spirituality we speak in terms of personal development and levels of consciousness. What if there is nothing to develop and no levels to achieve? What if we could stand in this moment and experience all that there IS? What if as time, as we know it, progresses, we continue to stay present in the moment?

Well, I don’t know about you, but that brought up a slew of other questions for me. The one that was most disturbing was reconciling the idea of goal achievement and staying in the present moment. Admittedly, I am attached to my goals. I spend a lot of time working on them, internally and externally. I visualize. I read them out loud. I plan my day around them. I breathe them. I am one walking goal achieving machine, and I’m good at it. I love achieving goals. It’s a high.

I realized this about myself last year when I was planning this year and I made a lot of my goals activities that I participated in and others I made destinations. I did that so that I would not constantly be living in “when that happens I will do…” So I have goals like exercising, meditating, and writing daily, and only eating when hungry and until full. Those goals - if they can even be called that - prevent me from constantly looking on the horizon. They help me to stay present.

On the other hand, I still have goals that are in the future, like being financially secure, and generating 500,000 page views. What of those goals? Do I just put them out of my mind?

Tolle goes on to talk of two concepts of time: clock time and psychological time. He describes clock time as a neutral container that we are living in. To my understanding, it’s like taking the attachment out of progression. It’s just a common descriptor of what time it is. Psychological time he describes as the time that we are attached to. Those moments in the the past that we keep replaying as though they were real and the days in the future that we keep looking forward to because they are going to be miraculously blissful and inevitably better than what we are experiencing now.

These ideas are a bit too technical for me, too semantic. I like to think of it like a braid of yarn. Now, for me is the junction between everything that is braided and the frays at the ends. It is the fulcrum. The moment where all possibilities exist.

The braided part will be the part that is done and the points at the end of the frays represent possible destinations. You can see the end of a fray, but you can only get there by choosing that thread in this moment.

Back to goals: One of the goals that I dropped for the year was ending up at a particular weight. Overall, I want to be healthy. I see it at the end of one of the frays. Every day I wake up, I have a choice, I can exercise or not. I used to be so focused on the end of the fray that I was not present to make the choice in the moment. As a result my goal of losing weight never materialized. Since I bring myself back to the choice everyday, I am progressing along the thread that leads to weight loss. I’m down 30 lbs because of it and everyday I notice the changes in my body. More than that, my overall goal of being healthy is materializing as well. I’m more active, vital, energized. My skin is smooth and radiant. I choose healthier foods. I feel alive.

All of the goals I’ve made that seem like destinations, I’ve brought down to choices in the moment. It is proving a very successful strategy for goal achievement.

Are you achieving your goals in the present moment or looking onto the horizon and missing the Now?

In Spirit,
Nneka