The Priceless Mind

You have been given one of the finest instruments in existence, and you use it to torture yourself with two things that are not real.

The past, which is over. The future, which has not come. Your mind spends most of its hours in one or the other — replaying what already happened, rehearsing what might. Rumination and anxiety. Those are the two crops this habit grows, and they are the only two.

Look at what you are wasting. The mind that could build, create, notice, love, solve — running in circles around a memory it cannot change and a fear that may never arrive.

What a waste of a priceless thing.

So put it to better use. The only place your mind can actually do anything is here, in the present, on the task in front of you. That is the one moment it has power. The past is closed. The future is a rumor. Now is the only workshop you are given.

In the end, all of it is lost. Your possessions, your achievements, even the people — you will be parted from every one of them. When you leave this world you take nothing but your present thoughts, and even that is a guess.

So do not spend the one tool you own grinding on what is gone and what is not here.

Use it now. On this. While it is still yours.

"Confine yourself to the present." — Marcus Aurelius