Opening paragraphs...................

      What happens in ordinary moments determines your future.

-Shane Parrish, Clear Thinking

A few more snippets......................

...........from Oliver Burkeman's 4000 Weeks:

 The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.

. . . our expectations are forever running up against the stubborn reality that time isn't in our possession and can't be brought under our control.

You only ever get to feel certain about the future once it's already turned into the past.

There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasping that there are certain truths about being a limited human from which you'll never be liberated.  You don't get to dictate the course of events.  And the paradoxical reward for accepting reality's constraints is that they no long feel so constraining.

We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command.  But all a plan is—all it could ever possibly be—is a present-moment statement of intent.  It's an expression of your current thoughts about how you'd ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future.  The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

To treat all these moments solely as stepping-stones to some future moment is to demonstrate a level of obliviousness to our real situation that would be jaw-dropping if it weren't for the fact that we all do it, all the time.

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you'll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.  And that therefore you had better stop postponing the "real meaning" of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.

About the future......................

"Remember, there's no greatness in the future.  Or clarity.  Or insight.  Or happiness.  Or peace.  There is only this moment.

-Ryan Holiday,  Stillness Is The Key

The important..................

"Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is to do good for the person standing at your side, for that alone is the pursuit of life." 

-attributed to Leo Tolstoy

While............................

17.   Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you.  Fate is at your elbow;  make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book 4