paying attention

in a systematic way and for no reason other than to be awake, because a lot of the time,

if you

pay attention to where your mind is at, it’s not in the present moment. It’s off someplace

else,

either in the future or in the past. You know all this. You spent huge amounts of time worrying

and planning and then being upset about what happened or what didn’t happen, and the

present

moment, which is the only time we have to create or to be in relationship or to love

or to do

anything, it gets kind of squeezed, and so we’re blasting through our present moments

to get

hopefully to better moments at some point, whether it’s the weekend or vacation in

the Bahamas

or whatever it is, where it’ll all fall together, and of course it doesn’t, because

it rains and the

kids are cranky or sick or you can’t go or whatever it is, so the conditions are never

actually right

for being in the present moment, which is why we don’t want to be there so much. I

mean, if

they were just great, then we’d all just be here all the time, but since it’s never

really satisfactory,

we drive ourselves insane, really, trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic

as opposed

to sort of understanding that we’re not the Titanic to begin with. So anyway, that

calligraphy is

the calligraphy for “mindfulness,” and I just want to say that in Chinese, various

ideograms are

made up of other ideograms, and the character for mindfulness is made up of the ideogram

for

“presence.” That’s the top one, like the little hat over the character for “heart,”

so when you hear

the word “mindfulness” you have to understand that it’s “presence of heart.”