Goals inherently draw you, your mind, your needs, your sense of success or failure, or your reason for contentment to a future that includes something you don’t currently have. And, in so doing, they create a dissatisfaction with the present – the now.
Values (or principles), on the other hand, are built on/in the past. Lessons from experiences, the roots of our “way(s) of life”, the historical basis from which we compare and consider what we do/will and do/will not like/accept/desire; at once the measure of our contentment and the roots of how we disconnect/protect ourselves from others. This is how values lived within keep us rooted in the past. The past that, because it is our foundations, then easily (subconsciously, unintentionally) becomes the security, the reason and the certainty with which we allow our values to become biases and judgements. which also creates and requires us to maintain a dissatisfaction with the present – the now.
Someone with goals has their head in the future. Someone with values has their head in the past. Both are dissatisfied with the present – the now.
Being present. Being content. Living in the now for no other reason than living in the now is the only true way to avoid the comparative dissatisfactions of the past or future. Finding fulfilment in this nothingness is the way we can loose the urgent senses that call us to live in our pasts or our futures.
Contentment is not found in that which we have lost, or in that wich we hope to gain. Contentment is presence in a moment – the now – that defines itself, confirms itself and completes itself. It is a circle, a breath, a second that measures only itself.
Living in the now, the state of “being present”, doesn’t exist long enough for values or goals to have any meaning within it. Yet it exists forever, in every moment. One after the other. Encompassing nothing but leaving room for everything. Never starting. Never ending. Always now.
Always present.
Anything that bridges moments, that partially or fully exists beyond or between, before or after, anything that encompasses more than one moment within itself, anything that is bigger than RIGHT NOW is a distraction. These distractions can be securely inhabited in the now, in the present, in each moment after moment; but doing so – living inside a distraction – isn’t actually living in the now, it isn’t being present, and it won’t bring contentment.
Because anything that moves us from this tiny moment right here, from The NoW, drags us to both the future and the past where lack, error, loss and want are free to roam.
When the wild wind met the wide, empty sky love was born.