Live the Moment
Paul Arnott

Introduction

We need to learn to live more fully in the moment. If we don’t we won’t stay sane in the face of this increasingly complex, troublesome world of ours. We live in one of the most stressful times in the history of the human race. Life in the new millennium will create problems for us as individuals and as a planet of even greater complexity. Society, as we have known it since the Industrial Revolution, will continue to change.

One in every hundred sexually active adults on the planet now is HIV positive. Racial hatred has become an epidemic, with the obnoxious phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ now used worldwide to justify genocide against religious and racial minorities. The lax handling of the nuclear arsenal and biological weapons by countries belonging to the former Soviet Union means we are still faced with the spectre of a global catastrophe. The destruction of our environment continues unchecked. Global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer will, if not remedied, cause the illness and deaths of thousands of human beings. Droughts caused by mismanagement of the Earth’s resources are causing the deaths of millions in Africa and Asia. The over-prescription of antibiotics and their use to prevent disease in animals may see the emergence of pandemics that cause the deaths of millions of people because new bacteria have become antibiotic resistant. The most widespread fear among people today is fear about the future.

When, on the 28th of April 1996, a gunman brutally murdered thirty-five people at the historic tourist site of Port Arthur in south-eastern Tasmania we were forced to acknowledge what we had long suspected: life is no longer safe, not even in sleepy Tasmania. We came to see that if people can die suddenly and brutally on a peaceful Sunday afternoon while eating lunch and sipping tea, they can die anywhere at any time in any place.

Simply coping with the speed of change has become a daily challenge. We have information coming at us from every direction: via the TV, radio, post-box, newspapers and magazines, the Internet and computer software. We are in the middle of a technological revolution, which will change our lives as much as the Industrial Revolution changed the lives of the people of the eighteenth century.

Doctors are becoming aware of a new syndrome called Information Fatigue Syndrome, the symptoms of which include paralysis of analytical ability, mounting anxiety and self-doubt, and an increasing tendency to blame others. It is suggested that more than one-third of all reported stress-related illnesses are being caused by information overload. There is a famous scene in the media movie Network in which the lead character, a television presenter, screams out the window, ‘I’m mad as hell and I can’t take it any more.’ More and more people feel like they can’t take any more of life the way it is. Youth suicide in the eighteen to twenty-four year age group has reached epidemic proportions in many countries, because many of our young people see no hope for the future. People are more stressed, more pressured than ever before.

To live longer, to live more healthily and to live more fully we need to find new resources and skills to cope. Medical science is just beginning to realise that health is inextricably linked to lifestyle. Two hundred years ago people died from typhoid and diptheria. Now we die of the stress-related diseases of cancer and coronary heart disease. Our frenetic lifestyles are making us sick, robbing us of the richness of our relationships with those we love, and killing us. I believe that one of the greatest causes of stress is the inability to live in the moment. We can find ourselves dwelling on the past with all its guilt and hurts, being traumatised by the future with its fears and anxieties, or living in the present in such a frenetic way that we fail to live life. Often we are just existing, instead of really living each moment to the full. The demands of daily life are so great and we are so busy that we constantly feel there isn’t enough time.

On King Island off Tasmania’s north-west coast, the wind is so strong that most of the trees have grown on an angle instead of straight. The elemental forces that have shaped them have caused them to grow abnormally, but the wind is so constant the effect has become permanent. The same can be true of life. The pressures of life can cause us to grow crooked, and out of balance, but to feel that crooked is normal. Learning to live in the moment will help us regain our balance. It’s the way we’ve been designed to live.

Copyright © Paul Arnott 2000