Enjoy the moment

Sometimes I read something that stops me dead in my tracks or can change the course of my day.

The story below is one of those.

It reminded me of the power of enjoying the moment, even if we are in the midst of chaos or difficulty. We can’t change the past. We can’t predict the future. But we always have the ability to experience the present.

It’s a simple message, but it can be easy to forget that life is a gift. Don’t let the tigers stop you from embracing who you are, right now, at this precise point in time…

― By Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well.

She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below.

This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”