There are two days in every week that we should not worry about, two days that should be kept free from fear and apprehension.

One is yesterday, with its mistakes and cares, its faults and blunders, its aches and pains. Yesterday has passed, forever beyond our control. All the money in the world cannot bring back yesterday. We cannot undo a single act we performed, nor can we erase a single word we said. Yesterday is gone to merge in the infinite past! We cannot change a single moment of our past.

When an event is past, do not nurse its memory. Cremate it and forget it. Otherwise it will decompose in the mind and stink.

The other day we shouldn’t worry about is tomorrow, with its uncertainties, its impossible adversaries, its burden, its hopeful promise and poor performance. Tomorrow is beyond our control. Tomorrow’s sun will rise either in splendor or behind a mask of clouds, but it will rise. And until it does, we have no stake in tomorrow, for it is yet unborn.

This leaves only one day — today.

Any person can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when we add the burdens of yesterday and tomorrow that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives people mad. It is the remorse of bitterness of something which happened yesterday and the dread of what tomorrow may bring. We should never brood over the past. Do not regret. Life is not a continuous procession of past regrets and future anxieties. Never ever live with regret. Regret is the chain forged by the mind to bind itself to the dead past. Whatever happened was destined to happen only that way. Why cry over spilled milk? Learn from the past and move on. We are unnecessarily consumed with remorse over the dead past and with worries and anxieties concerning the unborn future.

Sin and Guilt and regrets of the past and worries and anxieties for the future are the monstrosity of the mind. All our negative actions of the past are simply errors in judgement. If it has taught us something and if we have learnt that lesson, then it was not a total waste. Just remember the lesson and forget the event and not the other way round, which is what generally happens. We tend to remember the event and forget the lesson and therefore are condemned to repeat it again and again.

The mind tends to dwell in the past or wander into the future. The mind forges a chain to bind itself to the dead past or to an uncertain future, constantly avoiding the present. 

We can clutch the past so tightly to our chest that it leaves our arms too full to embrace the present.

The mind should be freed from the past, which exists but as memory and the future, which exists but as worry — a mixture of fear and hope. Only the present is. It is a ‘present’ from God. Reality is to love and respect our ‘present’. Present we cannot be without.

The present moment is all that we have at our disposal.

Live one day at a time! Have hundred percent presence in the present moment.

Living in the present moment means conscious action, not mechanical movement.

Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of everyday. Do it! Whatever you want to do, do it now! There are only so many tomorrows.

Life is not lived in the tomb of the dead moments of the past, nor is it lived in the womb of the unborn moments of the future. It is lived dynamically in the present moment. — Swami Chinmayananda