Living Life Consciously
Posted by Evan Bailyn on Thursday, January 24th, 2013 with 0 comments
Forty years from now, you will nostalgize about today. You will think back to the present moment, recalling how youth was full of choices and hopefulness. You will marvel at how blissfully uninformed you were about what the future held in store for you. The life you live right now will be a distant, golden memory.
Knowing how much you will value these days when you are older, how can you allow yourself to hurry through life? How can you not realize that every shred of your short existence is valuable? Each time you notice your days disappearing into an anonymous past, it should become more evident that you need to be living life as consciously as possible.
We all wonder sometimes about the purpose of life; often, we do so because we are searching for a way to justify death. And yet, the only way to understand death is to fully experience our everyday lives. Living life consciously involves thoughtful observation – not just of the outside world, but of our inner life. We should be taking note of our sense of identity at a particular time – our level of confidence, our anxieties, our far-flung wishes. If we have some record of our state of being at a given point in time, we can observe our personal evolution and ultimately gain some insight into our patterns and purpose.
And yet, as arduous as it may seem to keep track of all of our internal and external events, the feat can be achieved easily if we simply relax our definition of time. If we can view time as an invention of humans – and therefore not as linear and infinitely-accumulating as it seems in the abstract – we realize that life, and memory, are our collage to paste together however we wish. All the clues we need to figure out life’s meaning come from examining the collage as a whole and finding patterns of passion, compulsion, and purpose.
Therefore, experience the present vividly as it unfolds. In an ecstatic moment, allow the chemicals in your brain to percolate. Taste the pleasure as it pours out. In a bitter moment, allow the pins of pain to push through you. Fight the urge to close your eyes. Imbibe and absorb your emotions as if you were a child experiencing them for the first time. It is only through active involvement in your life, however exciting or mundane, that you can start to draw conclusions about why you are here.
In the end, this kind of conscious existence will give you far more solace than even the most successful unexamined life. For only those who have a clear vision of living can accept their passage into the next expanse.
Evan Bailyn is a serial entrepreneur, search engine and social media expert, celebrated author and child advocate. His company, First Page Sage, is a leader in search engine optimization and social media marketing - vastly increasing business for its clients through high SEO rankings, targeted Facebook advertising and viral videos. Evan is also the founder of the Evan Bailyn Foundation, a foundation dedicated to teaching emotional awareness to children and adults.
Leave a Reply