This Is It Includes What We Would Rather Exclude
This is it sounds easy when we like what is here. It becomes harder when the present contains a conflict, a loss, or an unfinished promise. Then we begin waiting for the moment when life will finally be the one we were meant to have.
The waiting can be so familiar that we fail to examine it. We ask whether this situation is acceptable, fair, or likely to improve. Those are useful questions. But another assumption hides behind them: that we cannot fully meet our lives until something else arrives.
Try setting that assumption down for a moment. This is what has arrived. The unwanted part belongs to the present as surely as the part we welcome. Saying so does not make harm good, rule out help, or ask anyone to remain in danger. It gives us a place from which to respond to what is actually happening.
We may still work to change a circumstance. We can make a request, repair a mistake, leave an unsafe setting, or prepare for a different future. The difference is that our action begins here rather than from a life we keep expecting to begin later.
Perhaps something else will come. We do not have to settle that question to notice what waiting has cost us. The present is already asking for our attention.