Living in the now

Yay! Today is Savage Chickens day – in my world, anyway.

In tribute to this excellent cartoonist who manages to fit drawings and words onto a yellow Post-it®, I slavishly follow Doug Savage’s copyright rules which state that as one of the other 7 billion-odd people in the world, I am permitted to copy one of his images every thirty days.

My early morning reading today over coffee was an article in Portuguese about the excuses children give for not doing their homework. I laughed out loud when I learned that one child failed to hand in an assignment because, “the dog vomited all over it”.

Which led me to think of Savage Chickens. I know, you are missing the connection. Well, most vomit looks like scrambled eggs to me, and chickens lay eggs. A little skip from one neuron to another and I arrived at Savage Chickens.

What would any of this have to do with living in the now?

Well, one of my pet hates is having to listen to people talking about how they are looking forward to the next big thing. They normally do this at the venue of the current big thing.

They are so busy enjoying the imagined delights of an anticipated event that they fail to appreciate the possibilities of the moment in which they currently find themselves.

You will find these people talking about Christmas Day at a dinner party in honour of someone’s birthday instead of, perhaps, complimenting the host or hostess on the fine food before them, or simply enjoying the company of the other diners.

The pet hate phenomenon works on the same principle as the “red car manifestation”. To explain: If you ever buy – or even contemplate buying – a red car, then suddenly, it seems, the world is full of red cars. By extrapolation, then, my pet hate results in my world being full of people not focussing on the present moment.

Most people will agree that “now is all we have”, although I have heard some strong but flawed arguments against this idea.

The theory goes that you achieve inner peace when you get in touch with “the now”. That is wonderful, but then, most people do not have a clue what to do with it, as illustrated so clearly below:

Seize your day! Savour the moment! And um, find yourself!

Allison

Other borrowings I have made from the wealth of fun at Savage Chickens can be found on blogs entitled, “Scrabs” and “Simon,Garfunkel and Yoda“.