Oh no... he's not on about meditation again, is he? Yes I am!! It's the door you need to walk through to get to mindfulness. If you want something - anything - in life, there are things that you have to do to get that something. If you want to be fit, you exercise. If you want to lose weight you manage your diet. If you want nice clothes or a nice car, you do what it takes to earn the money to buy them. If you want to be mindful you meditate... end of story.

If you don't meditate you won't develop mindfulness... and you will miss your life - pure and simple. As we speak, life is passing us by. Moment to moment life is ebbing away - if you're not fully living this moment, fully experience the magic of being alive, then you are wasting the unique opportunity provided by this moment... and this unique opportunity will never, ever, come again. If you're not fully immersed in this moment, in what you're doing in this moment and how that feels, when were you plannig to start living? And what were you planning to do to enable you start fully living?

As I write, today's post has just arrived - with a card from our neighbour three doors down the road, thanking us for our support around the time her husband passed away. We knew he was "on his way out" - he had throat cancer and he was eighty-two - but seeing the box being carried into the church a few weeks ago was like a jolt to the system - I'd only been laughing with him the previous Tuesday.

The one - the only thing - in life of which you are I are absolutely certain is that we are going to die... but we certainly don't bother our ass living like it matters. Maybe it's a psychological defence mechanism, a self-preservation thing. Maybe it's part of our "ordinary wiring" that distances from the experience of the now. However, it doesn't really matter what it is - it's not bloody good enough! I'm doing my level best to "smell the roses", to live in the moment... but I wouldn't be at the races at all were it not for meditation.