A Mason's Work

I want to talk a little bit about how special the present moment actually is.

And when we look at the present moment, the part of your life where you are listening

to these words, there is a constellation of things that have occurred to put you here

in this place at this time, listening to this recording.

And likewise for me as well, when you start to look at that and look at all of the things

that had to have happened, your parents had to have met, your grandparents had to have

met, generations, countless generations of your ancestors had to kind of get with it

and get along to making you.

The technology has to have been invented to both record what I'm saying and to present

it to you in the present moment.

The machine or piece of equipment you're listening to this on had to have been created and designed

by countless professionals.

The materials for which have to be scrabbled from the, you know, dug from the earth or

manufactured from stuff dug from the earth.

And from there, all of those things had to happen in just such a configuration to put

you listening to these words right now.

When you start to think about the absolute gift that the present moment is, the sort of

intense universal cooperation that had to happen.

You can argue what's happened, stance, you can argue with coincidence.

It changes nothing.

The fact that all of these things that happened in just such a way to put you where you are

right now is, in and of itself, the divine miracle.

Now, it doesn't, you know, however you approach the divinity that's on you.

And when it comes to the present moment, this sort of complexity, this, all of the contributing

factors that led to right now essentially present the world to you.

It is a present.

The present moment is a gift.

It is for you, for your use, for your appreciation, for your place to leave your mark.

So when you start to find yourself detaching from the present moment is when we typically

will find most suffering in life occurs.

And that is you want things to be different than they are right now.

That means you want right now to be different.

That is a projection into the present moment from the past or from the future.

If you can let go of those projections, you can be in the moment.

And you can take action in the moment that could lead to better outcomes to what you want,

eventually to create or grow or become all of that has to happen right now.

Every future is crafted in the present moment.

Every past has led to this.

This is your opportunity to take it and do what you want.

And when things feel icky, you are having a rough time, uncomfortable, all of that kind

of thing, it is essentially a rejection of the present moment in a lot of cases.

Now when we talk about things like pain and stuff like that, pain is a guarantee.

Man, you are going to go through life and there is going to be pain and that is a thing.

But you can live and be present through that pain and grow from it and become from it

and use the present moment to use that pain to create something new.

That is your gift.

You get to create all futures from right now.

As you go through your work, as you go through your day-to-day life, consider when things get

rough, what can I do right now?

Sometimes you just be present.

There are times when it just hurts and that is what it is going to do.

That is the moment for you.

But there are other times when the response that we have to the pain of the world or the

things the adversities we feel or even the joys that we feel might be a great place to

start to create a better future right now.