How to do I Get to "the Here and Now?"

Dear AB Curtiss

How do you generate the “here and now” when you don’t even know the next step to take?

A.

Dear A.

We are never in the “here and now” when we are depressed or consumed with anxious worry. The way to “here and now” (present reality) is to be found when we turn our thoughts away from our subjective focus on how bad we feel and look for something more objective.

One of the greatest gifts to us fragile mortals, for which we seldom think to be grateful, is the fact that there is always some “next task” to do. We don’t have to look far to find it: some picture to be straightened on the wall, some clutter to be picked up in the corner of the room, a bed to be made. 

Therefore there is always some “next step” take.  And once you earnestly attend to the first task, the second task will become even more readily apparent.

It is this new objective direction of thinking that will cause the brain to pause in its unrelenting subjective focus on our pain and for a moment take another neural fork off to the side of the painful neural pattern of thought. That is because the brain always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought and in doing the next task we are starting to concentrate on more objective thinking. And repetitive thinking of a thought makes it dominant. 

We just have to insist on the new objective thought direction we are taking and not get sucked back into subjective thoughts about our pain. Every time we get sucked back into the pain, we have to renew our concentration on the next task at hand which will always present itself. Insist, insist, insist and the newer objective thinking can prevail. A. B. Curtiss