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Live in The Present Now

Lukas Schwekendiek
3 min readDec 25, 2024

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Most people get one thing wrong when they think about living in the present: Thinking that you have to try to be present.

From the beginning you always were, and always are, in the present.

In fact, you cannot exist anywhere outside of it.

The problem is that very soon you started to get a sense of time and with that a sense of the past and future, but all of that is just in your head.

To get back to being present in the moment you do not have to add the present, but remove everything else.

Do not try to be present but try to let go of everything but the present.

This is what meditation attempts to train, and what you create when you focus everything on the current moment.

The biggest part, however, is just letting go of the thoughts you have of yesterday and tomorrow.

Whenever a thought comes up about how things were, how things should be, or what might happen, let it go.

The more you do this the easier it will be to recognize what the present really is and how to live in it.

There is a very nice Zen tale that can help to illustrate this:

“One day, two monks set out for a temple in a valley beyond the woods. While cutting a pathway through the

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Lukas Schwekendiek
Lukas Schwekendiek

Written by Lukas Schwekendiek

Life Coach, Speaker, Writer. Published on TIME, Inc & Huffington Post. Coaching available again! Email: Lukas.schwekendiek@gmail.com with the word "Coaching"

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