120 philosophical essays you must read in your life

Chapter 129

Chapter 7 Chapter 15 Living in the moment

[United States] Lisa Plant

You must rarely look up at the stars in the sky, maybe you think that they appear every day, so you don't look up at the night sky for months.But what if you encounter a rare meteor shower?Then the media will definitely make a big publicity in advance, and will praise its beauty and beauty afterwards.When that moment comes, everyone is sure to go out and look up and talk about how spectacular it is.The same is the stars, why do people treat the latter so lingeringly?

As Rodin said: "It is not the lack of beauty in life, but the lack of discovery." It is our greatest sorrow not to appreciate our daily life.In fact, we don't have to bother looking for "meteor showers", "meteors" can be seen everywhere.It's a pity that the "meteor shower" in life is always ignored, and we treat it as a "star" unintentionally.Think about it, before you get up in the morning, you start to worry about the cold after getting up and miss the last few minutes of warmth in the quilt; while eating breakfast, you are thinking about the traffic jam on the way to work; Start to design how to pass the time after work; while participating in social activities, worry about when you can go home.

We are always living the days of waiting, we rush to weekends, vacations, kids growing up, old age and retirement.When we are old, we say to ourselves, "Now I am a dying man."

We are constantly on the go.We swear at traffic jams; we run around like headless chickens in the supermarket; we keep changing channels on the TV; we keep urging our children to hurry up.Maybe we destroyed the universe, and the universe uses time to control us?

Thoreau said, "I can kill time and not have any ill effects afterwards." We are "killing" time, which used to be a way of doing nothing, but now we are literally destroying our time.We spend our time killing spirituality, killing the ability to enjoy pleasure.We are too self-centered, thinking that we have created the best civilization in human history, but we have no time to enjoy it. How is this different from Faust's exchange with the devil?

The reason we always prefer to watch "Meteor Shower" is because we always worry about not having enough time, just like we always feel that we don't have enough money.In fact, learning to enjoy the time we have is as important as the stars that appear every day.  …

【Together with you】

Anxiety stems largely from uncertainty about the future.The nature of people who like to plan for a rainy day puts our lives in the center of a vortex, always following the future time or the development of things to measure the current state of mind.Sad man, led by the nose by the unpredictable future.It is somewhat stupid to take today's youth as a bet for tomorrow.People who live in tomorrow cannot find the coordinates of life at this moment. Proverbs in the Bible say, don't worry about tomorrow, you don't know what will happen next moment.Learn to enjoy the moment, life really belongs to us.You can enjoy a leisurely life without money. Rich people may not really appreciate the joy of a leisurely life. Only those who despise money really understand the joy of it.

(End of this chapter)