The present is a gift. Can we take it?

Insecure Writer’s Support Group is the brainchild of Alex J. Cavanaugh. It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time to express our fears or offer encouragement to others. If you’d like to join, click on the link to sign up.

Thanks to the kind co-hosts, Laura at My Baffling Brain, Mark Koopmans, Shah Wharton, and Sheena-Kay Graham.

Today marks three years since the very first IWSG post. Next month marks one year since the IWSG site and Facebook group opened and there is great news for all the IWSG members. You can check here on either Alex's or the IWSG site (links above.)

I usually get my post ready a day earlier. Today I'm late in my own standards. I was uncertain whether to be on the insecure side or on the cheering one. I do have insecurities but all my complaints look so insignificant and silly these days. I've been surrounded by the presence of death. Before Tina Downey's passing, I heard about the cousin of a friend who was killed in a car crash. Next Sunday, I had breakfast with the news of Tina's passing and dinner with the news of my beloved uncle's passing. On Friday, another friend lost her father.

They were all different people in regards of their personality. Their deaths were in different circumstances and they were received in different ways. While some, like Tina and my uncle, cast light during their lifetime, others caused only trouble and wasted their life away.

I can't help to think on my own life. What I've done for myself and for others. Do the things I worry or complain about really matter at all or is it just a waste of time? Most of my insecurities are based on past experiences. Logic tells me that giving them the power to impair my growth means I live in the past. And he who lives in the past, waste his present and has no future.

A wise man told me once that people usually live crying the past and worrying to death about the future. "With one foot on the past and the other foot on the future, we pee on the present", he said. I can't help to think insecurities are born from the past and torture us about the future, therefore we miss the invaluable gift of the here and now. It is normal to have fears and traumas, it's normal to complain, it's normal to worry about what will come. Yet, the fact that it is normal doesn't make it automatically right or the best option.

So many times we have been told the present is a gift. Live in the here and the now. Do now what you plan to do tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. So many times we have been repeated to let go of the past. History cannot be changed. You can only learn from it and keep going. Past wounds are only useless burdens. Change, learn, open your eyes to the treasure you have now. And we keep nodding in agreement and vowing we will start doing this...tomorrow.

Why is it that hard to start embracing the gift of life now? What is wrong with today that so many of us make our best to escape from it? Wouldn't it be better to strive to make our best of the present, and if we don't like it, start to change it? Wouldn't it be worse to meet our final hour with the regret that we never took the time to actually live this life because we were extremely busy, either fearing it or complaining about it?

Dragon Hugs!