Serving up a mind omelette from the kitchen of my keyboard, concocted from a recipe of internalized rhetoric. In other words, I’ve been thinking about a number of things that initially felt unrelated and then seemed to connect with each other as I let them sit on the grill of time.

I know what came first and ended up triggering the rest. I woke up early a number of mornings ago and found myself worrying about a potential project. I got annoyed for worrying, which didn’t seem to fit the recent rhythm of my life. The last few hours before sunrise felt uncomfortable, but I was kind of stuck in the mind set.

Finally, it was late enough to get up, exercising a familiar discipline that prevents me from losing my mind in the whirl wind of strangeness. I then perched on the cushion for my Zen sit, which has now become a neurotic combination of abdominal crunches on my exhalations, followed by a quiet period of surfing my breath until the annoying sound of the timer goes off after 25, everyday minutes. Somewhere in there, the clock of life slapped me upside my head and I realized I had about 10 years left in this little adventure of mine. It also hit me that it didn’t matter what the hell I thought about it, because the actuarial charts are ice cold. Time does what it must.

Now, you will likely think this was a depressing idea, because it’s not something you like to dwell upon, but that’s not where I went and it’s not where I am going. Spiritual leaders and poets have been writing about the truth of mortality for thousands of years, so, believe me, I didn’t think I stumbled upon some revelatory bolt of lightening. Honestly, I just embraced this inescapable reality and started looking at my entire life through this temple of the temporary. It felt like glancing in the mirror and adjusting my tie, which was ever so slightly askew and now it looked just right and I smiled.

After my usual, obsessive compulsive routines, meticulously followed in their exact order, I carried my coffee over to the computer. I initially check for out of the ordinary emails, mostly spam and then always open my morning missive from Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine. The site starts with a quote, a tease for the main story. Sometimes, I go into the story, but often I am content to mull over the quotation. This time, it was the perfect coda for my ruminations on time. It simply said, Just This Moment.

The Buddha and I have been hanging out for decades and I enjoy our relationship. He has always been a stickler about time and the seemingly infinite ways to engage it. Having lost my father when I was only nine, force fed me the inescapable truth of my mortality, a huge deal with the Big Man. Figuring out a way to gracefully embrace this finite measure, fosters a strange kind of liberation. Automatically, the moment becomes the most important residence for your complete attention, because that’s all you got in your pocket.

Your past and your future are easy to hold. You can relax and think about where you’ve been and where you’re going. The problem is with the present, because it screws up everything. Your yesterdays and tomorrows keep changing, each time you look in either direction from this blurringly, velocious moment. Zen is filled with so many damn concepts, you can easily get a headache if you want to try and understand it, when the truth is, you cannot. I have one quotation out of the three million the Buddha is credited with, “Be where you are; otherwise you will miss your life.”

Let’s say the whole of my life is now the ten years I was thinking about a couple of days ago. The past and the future are these moving targets, one growing as the other is shrinking, with me in between, trying to live each fleeting second as best i can, untethered to either book end of time.

It’s funny, suddenly, along came the next ingredient for this new found recipe, which we can call the seasoning, the flavor. These days, optimism is a rare commodity and feeling hopeful is grounds for commitment. By accident, I stumbled upon a study, indicating scientists have found that repetitive, negative thinking in later life, where I am located, can cause an increase in levels of cognitive decline, leading to higher risks of dementia. In other words, what you think impacts on how you think. Man, this was a timely tidbit for me, like the perfect missing piece.

So, we have choice, or at least I do, because I cannot speak for you. I am gambling on the numbers when I say I’ve got ten years. You can do your own math and see where it takes you. I intend to keep an eye on myself and when I look at that damn glass, I want to see it half full. The glass and the water level don’t ever change, but every second of every day, we get to choose how we measure it. No matter how often I opt to quench my thirst, I want to drown any doubt in that ocean of ounces.