Wonderful article! I take comfort in these possibilities, my life is soaked in opportunities to move to the suggested peace and sanctuary of being calm, aware and present in “the next right step”. I’ve been looking in the mirror and don’t like a lot of the habits I do. I have to admit that my thinking for 65 years that the “right” circumstances someday will be the solution. My story to myself has proven to not be true.

Two years ago I retired from corporate America, have a healthy pension and savings and moved to a scenic wildlife ranch with beautiful home. Know what? I rush from one chore to the next in a mindless froth focused on efficiency, expediency and some imagined “completion”. I am looking for a “fix” only there aren’t any drugs involved other than my own mind body.

I seldom put tools away properly when finished. I am often not focused on my immediate surroundings or my breath. I rarely take calm walks. I infrequently sit on the balcony and watch the beautiful sunsets. Substitute filing and organizing paperwork for doing dishes or folding laundry and strike three — I’m out! The tasks as well as the steps and resources to complete them are not serene unhurried mindful events — they are mostly blurs with my mind racing through all the future imagined chores to be done and imagined consequences and outcomes.

This article was timely for me. I beg me to use the tools I know — prayer, meditation, breathing, pauses, willingness, open-mindedness, surrender … to move from the mirage of “someday” to the “this is it, today is all I have, this is not a dress rehearsal — modest as it is… this moment is my life”.