Today’s post is dedicated to my incredible grandmother, Mimi, or this her 82nd birthday.  I love you Mimi, thank you for your guidance, wisdom, and love!

What is the background static of your life?  When I’m really paying attention I can sense the background static of my life as a multitude of unfinished tasks.  My background static is the thought that I will be at peace when I have completed my goals.

This morning as I was getting dressed I heard the voice in my head going over the things that I still needed to do.  I also realized that along with that thought was the physical feeling of being tense and uneasy.  Part of this background static was the unexamined assumption that feeling tense and uneasy until “everything was finished” would help me to meet those demands.

I then decided to take a minute for everything to be completed.  Meaning, that for a minute I decided to suspend my disbelief and truly feel as if everything I had been going over in my mind was finished, and there was absolutely nothing more to do.  The feeling associated with this thought was complete peace.  That experience helped me to remember the true benefit of paying attention to the actual experience of the present moment, without making it a means to an end but rather an end in itself.

As long as we are alive there will be things to do, goals to be accomplished, tasks that need tending to.  To wait to be at peace until “everything is finished” is to avoid that peace, and life itself, until your journey here on earth has already come to an end.

That there is always more to do is not a problem.  The problem is the psychological feeling that there is always more to do.

In order to leave behind this unhelpful perception take one minute every hour to consciously be still and imagine everything you have ever needed to do, or will ever need to do, has already been done.  Take that one minute to experience being on the other side of the endless “to-do” list. That one minute can easily become two minutes, and eventually you end up solely in the perfect present and witness life as it unfolds before your watchful eyes.