I love the photograph I have included.  You may find that it appears a fair bit throughout my site.  It just seem sort of right.  Plus it is a good poster to have on your office walk when someone comes in and asks if they can talk to you and you look up at it and say how about NOW!

Anyway, this page is about a little book I read called ‘The Precious Present’.  It was written Spencer Johnson MD who also had input to ‘the one minute manager’, ‘the one minute father/mother’.  It was first published in 1981 and then again in 1984 by Exley Publications Ltd.  It’s a little bit of a ‘Blue Day Book’ type thing that really comes down to the last couple of pages.  I think it’s pretty important to see the sticker on the front of my book which says originally published at $14.99 and I bought it in an Op Shop for $1.99.

A man listened to his thoughts….

THE PRESENT IS WHAT IS:
IT IS VALUABLE.
EVEN IF I DO NOT KNOW WHY

IT IS ALREADY JUST THE WAY
IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE.

WHEN I SEE THE PRESENT,
ACCEPT THE PRESENT, AND
EXPERIENCE THE PRESENT.

I AM WEL, AND
I AM HAPPY.

PAIN IS SIMPLY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
WHAT IS
AND
WHAT I WANT
IT TO BE.

WHEN I FEEL GUILTY
OVER MY IMPERFECT PAST.

OR I AM AXIOUS
OVER MY UNKNOWN FUTURE.

I DO NOT LIVE IN THE PRESENT.

I EXPERIENCE PAIN.
I MAKE MYSELF ILL.

AND I AM UNHAPPY.

MY PAST WAS
THE PRESENT.

AND MY FUTURE WILL BE
THE PRESENT.

THE PRESENT MOMENT IS
THE ONLY REALITY
I EVER EXPERIENCE.

AS LONG AS I
CONTINUE TO STAY
IN THE PRESENT.

I AM HAPPY FOREVER:

BECAUSE FOREVER 
IS ALWAYS
THE PRESENT.

THE PRESENT IS SIMPLY
WHO I AM
JUST THE WAY I AM….
RIGHT NOW.

AND IT IS PRECIOUS.

THE PRESENT.

Well if you have read this far you will realise the above is a bit mantra-ish and has that ‘Blue Day’, self-help feel about it.  I suppose all of those things are true but it is about what I now do with that.  What I did with it is rewrote it to me, for me, in my thoughts.

It is in the from of my journal, with the picture of the clock and it tells me the time when I sometimes get a bit lost in when it is:

LEARN FROM THE PAST
Don’t live in the past
PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE
Don’t live in the future
LIVE IN THE NOW

When I wrote this I was also writing in my journal and getting the hang of what is NOW.  I wrote:

“Okay, this is getting weird now….  trying to understand the real now, because it is fleeting.
The PAST was when this page was blank
The PRESENT is me writing
The FUTURE is the blank lines…. which are to be filled
as I write in the NOW,
although,
I know what I have written and what I am about to write….
(I then drew a smiley face on the page)
or do I?
Did the smiley face change that,
because I only did it after I thought I was going to write something else.
WOW” 

It made a bit more sense when I was writing it and shortly after I wrote it.  Because I then went on for some pages describing the NOW in the park I was sitting in, which I had not noticed before.  I was waiting for friends and wrote “enjoying just waiting”.

The writings in the book, made me see the precious present that I was in.  I probably hadn’t even notices it even when I was reading the book until I drew the smiley face.

It made me happy too.