Now Is All That Matter

NOW! A simple word with deep meaning. In school I learned that NOW means doing it right away. “Do your homework NOW,” shouted my mum. NOW at that time means serious business, urgency, anxiety etc. Even the Hollywood movie goes, “Drop your gun NOW!”

In the years to come, I was exposed to a NOW that is of different meaning. It has another meaning altogether. NOW can mean PRESENT. Past, PRESENT, Future; that PRESENT.

So what about this NOW? Why is it so important? Why is so inspiring about NOW that I have to write about it here?

Reason is simply successful people operate from NOW.

Let me ask you, how many times did you get distracted when you are suppose to work on a task? How many times have you stop doing what you are suppose to do because of past experience? How many times you didn’t move forward because of worries of the future?

The fact is you can’t change the past, but you can change the future. And only by taking action NOW, you can start to create a different result in the future.

If someone asked you, “How much time do you have?” It’s a natural thing that we replied, “5 minutes, 1 hour.” But really if we look at things in a deeper perspective, the real time we have is NOW. We can’t have that 5 minutes that had just passed. And we don’t own that 5 minutes that is not yet here. So really, what we have is NOW.

I must say to be always in the NOW is not easy. There are distractions all around, past experiences and worries that can draw us away from the NOW. But you can experience great feeling from the NOW.

I’m sure all of us at one point or another had experience being in the NOW. You are totally focus on whatever you are doing, be it work, family, exercising etc. Things flow for you when you are in the NOW. You do not judge if it works or not, you just want to complete it. You are so into yourself that whatever that happens around you doesn’t affect your flow.

In the NOW, you feel powerful, in control and confident.

Since it’s not easy to be in the NOW for a long time, we can learn to increase the frequency to stay in the NOW. So how do we do that?

Have you watch any sports competition? The focus and concentration of the sportsman / sportswoman is the NOW. They are totally immense in their game, not allowing things around to distract them. This is especially true for fast speed sports like; F1, squash, tennis, table tennis etc.

Even a hobby like racing a remote control car on the racing track requires you to be in the NOW. Once I saw a few guys racing their remote control car on high speed. I asked myself why would people enjoy this hobby, because it’s just go round and round the small track.

The answer is racing their car on track requires full concentration and focus. The hobby brings them to the NOW. Next question is why would we want to embark on an activity that brings us to the NOW?

It can be because we as human being want to be in the NOW. When we were a baby, NOW is everything we had. The process of growing up distracted us, brought us away from the NOW.

Pick up a sport or some hobby that requires some speed to train your NOW. For me, being in front of the room conducting workshops is a process of getting into the NOW. I got to have full concentration and focus to deliver what I need to deliver, which is maybe why I enjoyed standing in front to feel the heat.

Writing this post comes from the NOW. I just keep writing and writing with only one purpose – to share this thought. Hopefully I can get you to stay in the NOW.