Completely Present, Right Now

Recently in this drastic life change, I have decided to take acting classes. For me, acting has always been something I enjoyed doing and participating in. When I was younger I used to be more active in that sort of activity but I was always type-casted in the more bitchy or evil roles. It has to be my resting bitch face! (Resting bitch face- when a person comes off super bitchy while not actually making any facial expressions on purpose.) So although I apparently do a great bitch or witch, sometimes hey, I want to be Dorothy or Cinderella too. Anyways while my passions for drama took a background to sports and then to archaeology, it has always been itching around in the back of my mind for me to try my hand at. Fast forward to now, I'm pursuing other careers but on the side I have begun to take acting classes in hopes that any of my attempts at thespian pay off. I'm not here to talk about my pursuits of happiness but rather on something I learned in class that I felt could be transferred into other aspects of life, not only for me, but for other people as well.

One of the important things to remember when acting is to be in the moment. Once it’s show time whatever has happened to you personally at that moment is null and void. For that moment until you walk off the set the character you embody is all you know. Until the curtain folds whatever you have going on in your personal life is on pause. How can this translate to you or me in our real lives? Well there are many moments in life that we all have a tendency to overlook or not fully experience because we are too busy worrying about the future or the past. The past is unchangeable. Worrying about the past is useless. Until one of you invents a time machine that works, that is able to be marketable, and able to be mass produced, we are all stuck on this linear time line. That means every moment you have already spent is gone. All your mistakes, though they can directly affect your future, have already been done. Acknowledge them, learn from them and live in the present with the mindset that your decisions will shape your future. So when you are spending time with your love ones don’t sit there mulling over things that are insignificant. Be able to enjoy every bit of those moments you can because there is no going back and there might not even be a tomorrow. So yes your lights might get turned off tomorrow but when your child wants to spend time with you coloring his/her coloring book, be present in that moment. Life goes by fast, especially once there are children that grow up so fast in front of your eyes. The passage of time in life feels like it’s exponential speeding up, so although time flies, try to slow down those important moments and live them freely, entirely.