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strikes me every time I read it. The present moment cannot be cut in half. It cannot be stored or saved. It can only be accepted for what it is. The moment you try to hold onto it, it has already become the past. Epictetus, who began life as a slave and ended it as one of antiquity’s most admired teachers, made the same point from a different angle. He distinguished between what is “up to us” and what is not. The past is not up to us. The future is not up to us. The only thing that is ever truly ours is our response to this moment. Johnson’s protagonist doesn’t understand this for most of his life – and the irony is that his relentless search for the Pres- ent is precisely what keeps him from finding it.
The Present Is the Present: Ancient Wisdom for a Distracted Age
GERHARD GSCHWANDTNER
A few days ago, I rediscovered a small book on my shelf – Spencer Johnson’s The Precious Present written in 1984. You could read it in an hour. But its central idea has stayed with me for decades.
The story is deceptively simple: A boy spends his whole life searching for a “present” that will make him happy forever. He looks everywhere. He travels, he strives, he suffers. And then, finally, he understands. The “Precious Present” isn’t a gift wrapped in ribbon. It is the present moment itself – the now that we spend most of our lives running away from. I’ve interviewed hundreds of top sales leaders, CEOs, and peak per- formers over the years. And if I had to name the one quality that separates truly fulfilled people from perpetually restless ones, it would be this: the abil- ity to live fully in the present moment.
THE STOICS KNEW IT Long before Spencer Johnson wrote his book, the Greek philosophers had already cracked the code. The Stoics understood that human misery has a single root cause: We attach our happiness to things we cannot control – yesterday’s regrets or tomorrow’s anxieties. Marcus Aurelius, who ran an
empire, put it with his characteristic precision:
“Confine yourself to the present.” And elsewhere in Meditations: “Every man lives only this present
time, which is an indivisible point.” That phrase – indivisible point –
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FREUD’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS Freud observed that we are often haunted by the past. The past doesn’t simply recede; it hides in the shadows of the present moment. It impacts our relationships and distorts our views of what’s right in front of us. When we obsess over what was or what should be, we are often opening old wounds rather than exploring the magic con- tained in the here and now. But it was Donald Winnicott who
brought the concept of the “now” into sharper focus with his distinction between Being and Doing. Winnicott argued that psychological health re- quires the capacity to simply be – to exist without constant performance or striving. When we lose that capac- ity, we live in what he called the “False Self”: a persona constructed to manage the world rather than experience it. Johnson’s allegory is, in Winnicott’s terms, a story about the recovery of the True Self. When the old man finally stops chasing the Precious Present and allows himself to be in it, he stops performing his life and starts living it.
FLOW, MINDFULNESS, AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF TIME Modern psychology has arrived at the
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