Preferences

The universe is always giving us something in every moment. What makes the difference between being happy and being unhappy is that we have preferences. The world offers pain and pleasure, joy and sadness. We cannot escape what we are given. We cannot change the way the world is in any given moment. Our having preferences only adds suffering on top of our experience of what is given. When we get what we prefer we suffer that we may lose it. When we get what we do not prefer we suffer over what we believe we should have gotten.

The truth is that we can experience pain without suffering and pleasure without worry that it may end. But we must be willing to live in the moment. We must be willing to fully experience what we are given without thoughts of the past or future. It is only then that we can truly experience being alive.

Living in the moment is a practice that we take on so that we can fully experience being alive. The past is gone there is no life there. There are only fleeting memories of moments that are no longer real. The future is yet to be created. What we seek to create in the future is given by how we are in the present moment. It makes no sense to live in the future. It makes no sense to live for the future.