The Power Of Now

The Power of Now shows you that every minute you spend worrying about the future or regretting the past is a minute lost, because the only place you can truly live in is the present, the now, which is why the book offers actionable strategies to start living every minute as it occurs and becoming 100% present in and for your life.

If I asked 100 people to name the two most common bad feelings they can think of, 99 of them would probably respond with regret and anxiety.

Wouldn’t you?

The reason we regret and worry about a lot of things lies in the way our minds work. The constant stream of consciousness and thoughts in our head, which plays 24/7 in our heads, is mostly preoccupied with 2 things: the past and the future.

When you wake up 10 minutes too late in the morning, what’s the first thing you think? “Shit, I overslept, I wish I hadn’t hit the snooze button.” closely followed by “Oh no, now I’ll be late for work, I’m sure my boss will yell at me!” – and voilà, you’ve ruined at least the first half of your day.

Tolle says that the only important time is the one we think about the least: the present. The reason only the present matters is that everything happens here. Everything you feel and sense takes place in the present. When you think about it, the past is nothing more than all present moments that have gone by, and the future is just the collection of present moments waiting to arrive.

Therefore, living in any other moment than the present is useless. If your task is to hand in a research paper in 14 days, neither regretting all this time you procrastinated nor worrying about the big workload that’s to come will actually help get you there.

But if you just start solving the first tiny problem and come up with an outline, it’s all downhill from there.

I’m a big fan of stoicism. Part of their philosophy includes the idea that the only pain you really suffer is the one you create yourself. Tolle would surely agree since he argues that pain is nothing more than the result of you resisting to all the things you cannot change. We think a lot about the future and the past, but can live only in the present and have therefore no means to change many things from the other two that we’re unhappy about. Then we fill the gap between these by developing a resistance to these things, which is what we experience as pain, whether psychological or physical. When you’re angry, that anger usually makes you…