Borrowed thoughts

Do You Believe in Magic?
by Marianne Williamson

At a certain point, life becomes less about who you're becoming and more about who you've become. What you used to think of as the future has become the present, and you can't help but wonder if your life wouldn't be better if you'd just lived it more fully in the past. But how could you have? You were too busy thinking about the future!

Once you're past a certain age, you can hardly believe you wasted even one minute of your youth not enjoying it. And the last thing you want to do now is steal any more life from yourself by failing to be deeply in it while it's happening. You finally get it--not just theoretically, but viscerally--that this moment is all you have.

You don't close your eyes anymore and wonder who you might be in 20 years; if you're smart, you study the tape of your current existence to monitor how you're doing now. You see the present as an ongoing act of creation. You look more closely at your thoughts, behavior, and interaction with others. You understand that if you're coming at life from fear and separation, you have no reason to expect anything but fear and separation back. You seek to increase your strengths and decrease your weaknesses. You look at your wounds and ask God to heal them. You ask forgiveness for the things you're ashamed of. You no longer seek your satisfaction in things outside yourself, completion in other people, or peace of mind in either the past or future. You are who you are, not who you might one day be. Your life is what it is, not what it might someday be. Focusing on who you are and what your life is right now, you come to the ironic and almost amusing realization that, yes, the fun is in the journey itself.