When I was a kid in school (which was a very long time ago) I used to worry about a lot of things. I worried about the work that I knew I should do, I worried about what I would be when I grew up and how I should go about that, I worried about my relationships and whether I was like by the people I wanted to be liked by, and I worried about my relationship with God and whether He was pleased with me.

Then I discovered that there were verses in the bible that tell us to not worry. This made me worry more.

All the while, I am all too aware, that the reality of the world and my experience of it is now, in front of me, making up the substance of my life through a series of present tense happenings, or as Annie Dillard famously and rightly said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  Said another way, our life is the net result of billions of “nows” where we have the opportunity to be present to reality, and we also have temptation to escape it by looking longingly, or loathingly, either forward or back.