I remember a forum discussion where an Aspie was talking about his problems when living in the moment. Someone else commented that living in the moment sounded like a great idea and they wished they could do the same.

Yeah, haven’t we seen the movie/read the book and envied that wonderfully crazy guy that was living in the moment, improvising his whole life and just having a laugh all day, not a worry in sight?

I used to live in the moment, sometimes I still do, and I’m working hard not to.

You might ask why on earth I would go and do such a thing, aren’t living in the now supposed to be fun?

Sure, when you get into the zone, has flow, create faster, better, cooler than ever before, get everything right and the only thing existing is that wonderful thing called the “Now and Here”, then living in the moment rocks.

But when you drop out of “the zone” hungry, just to realize you forgot to do the grocery shopping, and whatever, there’s no clean plates anyway, but then again – oops isn’t it about time to head for work, and what happened with sleeping, and why the hell didn’t I do the laundry in the weekend as I had planned to… then living in the moment suddenly isn’t so hot anymore.

Living in the moment actually means living in the moment, not just paying it a visit whenever it’s fun to do so… However, I am pretty certain I have a huge advantage here, and all I need to do is learning to control it (or well, at least learn to leash/unleash it…)

I believe both the controlling and unleashing of the moment is important. You could just ride the wave, forget about food, sleep, clean clothes, work, family, economical independence, etcetera… or you could tie it down with ropes and chains, controlling it so hard it won’t even be able to wriggle an ear, and you will probably lose something potentially creative, productive and really powerful in both cases.

I believe, the key is being able to decide when to be in the moment and when to be in the “future”.

I think one way of doing that might be by using mindfulness. At least then I can decide when to start, or not, by creating distance to the impulse to enter “the zone” long enough to allow myself to make a conscious decision about to enter or not. It would then be interesting to see if I might be able to use the same tools to leave “the zone”, or keep in touch with time while “in there.”