Living Positively: The Must Do of 2015 for South Sudanese
5 min readA Fresh Start for the Distressed Nation
By Arok Deng Abuoi, Australia
January 2, 2015 (SSB) — It’s a new start once again: Twenty- fourteen has gone with all of it belonging and it’s time we start a new and fresh year, 2015. While you’re all going about celebrating the end of 2014 as well as welcoming the New Year, 2015 in your own ways, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all, my families, friends, acquaintances and not to forget my foes, Happy belated Christmas and Happy New Year. The memories and achievements, I shall always cherish, of twenty fourteen were possible because of your surrounding. Your present in my twenty fourteen, as well as my life, as been tremendously tangible and I have you to thank for all that. Happy New Year!
From what I had learnt last year (2014), your contribution, as family, friends, Acquaintances, in my life has been huge and I thought it was time I reciprocate the favour. I have found a message worth sharing with you. Wait I will tell you what it is. I have found myself a personal saviour and I believe it could be yours as well once you also embrace it. I will not be dragging this long and I am saying it right now. My newfound saviour, in my life, is the “Power of Now”.
Now what do I mean by the “Power of Now”, I believe many of you may be asking this question right now. Well wait, I will explain that to you in a moment but let me ask you some few questions. Have you ever find yourself thinking about what happened to you in the past and the more you think about it the more it makes you angry? Do you easily feel offended once people say something negative about you tribe, faith, ideology and the list is long? Have you ever dismiss what you suppose to do/ enjoyed in a day in hope that good things are yet to come?
Well, you should know from now on that you are identifying yourself with your mind, rather than your conscience state, if any of the above things do occurs to you. Mind can’t exist in the absent of time. The mind goes back to the past for self-definition and self worth. With it come the ego and your class along the societal ladder. If something threaten that believed, or run contrary to what your mind believed about you, the mind invited deep pain body within you and your mind will therefore cause you to become angry. This happen because something in you is refusing to agree with what you’re thinking, or refusing to accept what happened to you in the past and it’s therefore taken as a threat.
The same is also true about how your mind perceive the future. It always turns the present moment into a mere stepping-stone into the future hence rendering it, the “Now”,as useless and worthless. You should know that there is nothing wrong with hope and planning for the future but once the present moment become a time that need to be wasted and treated with less consideration, now we have the problem. There is no problem when planning while giving love and time to the people who matters to you the most, but you will all agree with me that putting your entire time into work while neglecting your beloved one is nothing but a bad choice. Mind plays its timecard properly and that is where it finds meaning in itself. It’s can’t exist in the present of present time, the “Now” and it’s threaten by “Now”. Without time our minds would refers to nothing and we would always be happy.
Now I want you to close your eyes and ask yourself this question, what is my next thought going to be. You become more alert than ever before, and if you were eating by now you will smell the flavour of your food lingering in the air around you. If you were taking shower/bath you should smell all fragrances in that soap you might be using. This state you find yourself in is the “Now”, your conscience state, and the peaceful state. I know this because I have also tried it as well. The “power of now” is nothing but living with truth about you while taking what rightfully belong to you. For instances, the smell of the soap.
Our tribes, faith, customs, ideologies and all other definitive aspect of human being are very crucial in how we live our live. Because of them we are able to tell great stories of strength, love, companion, hope or endurance but there is nothing as important as the “Now”. That is because the importance of all those things listed above lie in the times that is of less use to us. Embracing “Now” allowed us to plan for the future while enjoying what “Now” is to offer; to accept whatever it is that didn’t go according to plan in the past hence causing us little or no pain; make us more alert and more peaceful as we are protected from negative thinking that often results in the wasteful leaking of useful energy.
You have been given yet another three hundred and sixty five blank days to write you live once again. You can make it a year of peace, prosperity and all good things you could ever think about. However, you can choose to live yours free from time and mind. It’s a message worth embracing and I urge you all to add it into your “must do” list of twenty fifteen and it will not be long before you harvest the fruit of “Now”. Take it and set yourself free.
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