10% Happier

Recently, I decided to start meditating in order to be more mindful of the present, be less anxious about the future, and to just enjoy things as they happen. It’s not an end-all-be-all cure to life’s problems, but it feels good and definitely helps reshape your perspective on things.

I picked up the book 10% Happier by Dan Harris.

It definitely seems like one of those cheesy self-help books, but it was a pretty quick and easy read.

Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We “live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during which we will certainly be fantasizing. But as Tolle pointed out, it is, quite literally, always Now. (He liked to capitalize the word.) The present moment is all we’ve got. We experienced everything in our past through the present moment, and we will experience everything in the future the same way.

I’d encourage folks to try it.

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