To truly live in the present seems hard for some folks. But it isn’t, really.

Drop your expectations, drop your wandering eyes on the next best thing to walk through the door, drop your meandering thoughts to maximize your time until your next engagement or counting down the time until you can go to your next planned thing. Now, what do you have left with?

This moment.

This is how you can never plan for your life. It’s not the flavor everyone will taste and like. Ambiguity isn’t for everyone but how shall you know unless you try? Open minds, open hearts, open up.

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Stop keeping time.

For once, stop keeping time. And please, for the life of you, stop saying ‘I’ve got some time to kill.’ Whenever I hear that, I want to immediately strangle the person who just uttered those blasphemous words that make my ears bleed.

The only clock you can say I have is the time that is synchronized with wherever I’m at in the world on my MacBook. Summer 2010, I gave my watch away and threw my planner out. November 2010, I gave my cell away.

Now what?

How do I know what time it is? For the most part, I don’t. Minutes feel like hours, days feel like weeks. I live by the sunrise and sunset. Or, by the departure time of the next bus, train, plane or boat I’m taking.

Impractical? Sure, that is, to the practical person. Practicality, to many extents, is subjective. What is deemed crazy to some seems normal to others. What is considered bad to some is good to others.

Allow yourself the notion of not keeping time.

Time cannot be kept and stored. It can only be used. Use wisely your finite time in this world by not wasting it on superfluous matters that don’t make your heart pulsate and quiver. This moment is all you have.

Stop scheduling.

Schedules are the death of my creative spirit. If you’ve ever felt hindered because there was a schedule you had to keep, that is a part of your self being murdered.

Like holding back the ocean with a toothpick. You fucking can’t do it, so why? Why? Do tell me a good reason why.

Schedules are laborious, guilt-ridden, self-imposing and self-suffocating. Some schedules will suit the nature of the person well. Active movement of the body for exercise is one. Connections with your closest loved ones while one or both of you is away is another.

But day-to-day things? Play dates with the neighbors? IKEA purusing, Costco shopping, mall ratting? These things can go.

How do you expect to have spontaneous adventures when you’re running late for your nail salon appointment?

Stop expecting.

Arrive at a destination you’ve been yearning for. Expectations abound like the days you’ve counted down until you’ve arrived. Now that you’ve arrived … ?

Expect much and reality doesn’t play out to those expectations? Disappointment washes over.

This isn’t to say that we just ought to lay around like apathetic, ignorant fools. It isn’t for the lack of tenacious free-spirited living that is within us that we don’t expect. It is for the lack of continually wanting what is not even there.

Introduce a delicious, inexpensive, processed fast food meal to a community which never knew such ‘foods’ existed and voila! Now we have comparison and expectations.

Who can go back to expensive, laborious and cumbersome green vegetables and fresh fruits when we can drive through the corner McDonald’s and get our Big Macs in 30 seconds flat?

Expectations are fatal to the life and breath of our spirits within. We live not for the sake of knowing the end destination of our travels or the plot within the novels we read and write. For if we knew too much, the fun would be nonexistent.

Moment-to-moment living, like I’ve mentioned already, is not the flavor everyone will taste and like. But try it sometime. Try living vicariously through yourself, not just through the words and life of another audacious person.