I call them time bandits, the moments when we phase out and allow emotion and thoughts from the pass to steal away your present moment; the place where you live.

Let me give you an example to start off with. Lets say you have had a big fight with your husband or wife first thing in the morning, and now you are driving to work, gripping the steering wheel and fuming about this and that, replaying the memory of the fight over and over in your mind. You get to work barely cognizant of how you got there then stomp into your office angry about the day.

During that time you have completely lost track of your life.

You failed to notice on your drive in just how the fog banks weaved between the mountains, low down on the slopes. You didn’t see the sunlight higher up the slopes sparkling off new fallen snow. You failed to noticed the clear blue sky and the two eagles soaring on the thermals over the steaming river. You missed the deer grazing at the side of the road. You missed a whole hour out of your life.

You’ve just been robbed by time bandits who have made off with the prize of an hour out of your day.

What did the whole exercise of replaying the fight do for you? Oh you made yourself right and the other person wrong and you validated your rightness in a number of ways, but the fight is still there and nothing about it has changed because the past is forever inaccessible to you.

You may have even speculated just what you where going to do to that person when you got home that night, maybe even resolve not to speak, to use the silent treatment and really make them wrong.

But that’s in the future and you don’t live there. You live only here in the now, in this one moment, one moment at a time.

You’ve allowed attitude to select you instead of you selecting your attitude.

Unfortunately this scenario plays out many times in a single day. The lapse may not be as dramatic as that. Simple little things rob us of our lives everyday. Replaying the conversation with your boss, trying to decide if your co-worker was making a dig with her last remark…wondering what you will wear to the dinner on Saturday night.

How do you change the distractions to focus more directly on the moment, and there by live your life to the fullest?

It takes time, practice and a will to succeed.

Here is one little trick I use to retrain my brain. When I catch myself drifting off on a tangent I stop and say:
“Wait a minute, I am not going to let time bandits steal my life,” and force myself to refocus on what I am doing. As you do this you will slowly build a new pattern in the brain, that brings you closer to living your life in the now, the only real place you can live it.

You have the power to live your life in its fullest capacity once you chase away those time bandits.

Nick

Next time I will talk about one of the biggest time bandits out there.

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