Three enemies of personal peace: regret over yesterday's mistakes, anxiety over tomorrow's problems, and ingratitude for today's blessings. ---William Arthur Ward
William Arthur Ward was a Christian Wesleyan/Methodist leader in the last century who wrote many philosophical maxims about how one can live the most effectively. I picked the above quote to discuss because its wisdom is so self-evident...yet how many of us ignore its clear message? For all of us, our lives take place in the "now", not the past or future, yet how much do we spend in terms of time and energy focusing our attention on anything but what's actually going on around us? Sure, like just about everyone else I can harbor all kinds of second-guessing and resentment about things I should have (or not) done in the past or the way other people treated me...but while all that is going on in my head I'm letting my real life...happening right now...go by the wayside. And about tomorrow...what I do while focused on what is going on now will take care of that abstraction of time as it slips into the present "today". And Ward's last part, about the need to take notice of the many blessings in my present life, is the solution to the problem of dwelling too much in the past or future: after all, if my temporal home in the present is so attractive with its many blessings, then why direct my attention "anytime" else?
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