You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Breathe in and tell yourself that a new day has been offered to you, and you have to be here to live it.

Breath is a natural thing, like air, like light; we should leave it as it is and not interfere with it. What we are doing is simply lighting up the lamp of awareness to illuminate our breathing. We generate the energy of mindfulness to illuminate everything that is happening in the present moment.

Do not fight against pain; do not fight against irritation or jealousy. Embrace them with great tenderness, as though you were embracing a little baby. Your anger is yourself, and you should not be violent toward it. The same thing goes for all of your emotions.

Both sides belong to you, the good and the evil. Evil can be transformed into good, and vice versa. They are completely organic things.

If you look deeply at a flower, at its freshness and its beauty, you will see that there is also compost in it, made of garbage. The gardener had the skill to transform this garbage into compost, and with this compost, he made a flower grow.

You are here for life; and if you are here for life, life will be here for you.

Being truly here is very important—being here for yourself, and for the one you love. How can you love if you are not here? A fundamental condition for love is your own presence. In order to love, you must be here.

We must practice resurrection, and this is an everyday practice.

Without suffering, we do not have the opportunity to cultivate compassion and understanding; and without understanding, there can be no true love.

We have spoken of the organic nature of things. Suffering is also organic. It is from garbage that we produce flowers; and similarly, it is from suffering that we produce understanding and compassion.

Happiness is a function of compassion. If you do not have compassion in your heart, you do not have any happiness.

To me, the definition of hell is simple. It is a place where there is no understanding and no compassion.

To be loved is to be recognized as existing.

When we have an unpleasant feeling, we say to ourselves, “This feeling is in me, it will stay for a while, and then it will disappear because it is impermanent.”

I have been running all my life, but now I am deciding to stop because I have learned that life is here.

We can only take care of our future by taking care of the present moment, because the future is made out of only one substance: the present. Only if you are anchored in the present can you prepare well for the future.

Happiness can be attained by letting go, including letting go of your ideas about happiness.

You probably received a college degree that you spent years working for, and you thought that happiness would be possible after you got it. But that was not true, because after getting the degree and finding a job, you continued to suffer.

Called out lmao.

You are afraid of the pain in you, and so whenever there is a gap in your day, you fill it up with books or television so these blocks of suffering do not come up to the surface.

CALLED OUT AGAIN.