What Was I Thinking?

The more I meditate the more awareness I have.  The more present I become.  I spent very little time in the present before I got sober. Our minds are meant to think.  My mind ran hog-wild for the first thirty years of my life.  It did whatever it wanted and what it wanted, apparently, was to relitigate my past, especially concentrating on slights and insults while ignoring any instances where I might have been at fault, or to blow into the future, where terrible things were happening to me or where I wasn't getting what I wanted.  This doesn't make me bad or even unusual.  The ability to be present is not easy to achieve.  The fact that the mind does a lot of thinking is good: it prepares me for the future and it reminds me of past failures and dangers so that I can better prepare for the future.  Good for the brain and fair enough.  The misery comes when I let my mind spend every waking minute in the past and in the future because at that point I'm never in the moment.

The more I explore meditation and mindfulness the more I find that the call to be present, to be in the here and now, is Task One in almost every philosophy and religious, spiritual concern that I've ever run into and - still, to this day - I find it to be a fleeting skill.  I find myself in the past and in the future and ignoring where I am at this moment, right here, right now.  I miss everything.  I miss life when I'm in the past and in the future.  One memory seared into my white matter is of a day in the Midwest, a Saturday, where I had errands to run on one of my two days off, lots of errands because I'm a Type A, it's-never-enough kind of human being, and I can't remember if it was Fall or Spring but it was a beautiful day in one of the two best seasons when you live in a cold winter/hot summer climate, and I was putting some groceries in the trunk of my car after careening from one critically important chore to another, when I looked up at a blue sky with puffy clouds not careening along, a cool breeze touching my skin, and I thought: "I missed the whole day, this whole, beautiful, perfect day."  Some of this is okay: life's life and we have stuff to do.  You can't ignore a crying, hungry baby with a full diaper because you want to meditate but the point is to be present, to enjoy the moment as best as you can.  I did not have the ability yet to be where I was.  I was always elsewhere.  

Have you ever done something really stupid and thought afterwards: "What the hell was I thinking?"

Exactly.  Precisely.  What was I thinking?