“The living moment is everything.”  ~D.H. Lawrence

One of the most powerful ways that my positivity quest has evolved lately, is in my aspiration and dedication to befriend the present moment.  Today I had plenty of opportunities to practice as I raced between multiple connections across the country.  So as I processed the real possibility of missing the next connection or realized that I had lost my bag claim ticket, instead of perseverating on the stress and developing the drama of the story line, I wondered what would happen next. Befriending the moment means literally that we face all outer circumstances as though we invited them.

This takes practice, not only in lifting the habitual judgments of good and bad, acceptable or unacceptable that we use to measure our life, but even more deeply in being willing to jump into the unknown. What I realized as I was flirting with the unknown consequences of traveling, which is by its very nature, mostly out of our control, is that  I could wonder, I could be curious.  The stress I was feeling transformed when I embraced the mess as if I had invited it. I could see the anxiety I was producing about missing my next connection or the possibility of my bag not making it through for what it was.

I am not sure if we are so habituated by the stress response we generate by life’s turns that we just go to the worst case in our mind, long before it transpires or if we make up these stories to distract us from the groundless place of not ever really knowing what might happen next.  For me today, it turned out that embracing the moment and all of its uncertainties in the end was way more comforting than preparing myself for the worst.  Often the worst doesn’t happen, and in hindsight we waste our attention and adrenals on things that we never had to deal with.

But better still, really employing the power of wonder in moments when things are less than clear awakens you to enjoy the adventure of where you are. You actually see more of what is around you when you are not consumed in self propelled stress. Although I can’t prove the causal relationship, I am more and more convinced that the act of trusting the process, surrendering willingly to the unknown creates an invitation of its own to more good than you can imagine.