“In order to speak what you might regard as the truth, you have to let go of the outcome. …[You have to decide:] I’m going to state what I think as clearly as I can and I’m going to live with the consequences no matter what they are. That’s an element of faith.”
—Jordan Peterson
Any future perfectly known, said Alan Watts, is already the past.
But life is not in the past. Life is now, life is here, life is this moment.
The only way to live it is to be as truthful as you can be.
Doing anything else is not living or being in the moment. Anything less than truthfulness is an attempt to distort the past or control the future. And when you’re busy trying to distort or cover or change the past, you’re not in the present. When you’re focused on managing and controlling the future, you’re not in the present.
You are in a time that does not exist: past or future.
When your attention is there, it is not present in the only time that does exist. Right now. This moment.
When you focus on the past or the future, you opt out of existing in the present. As long as you choose to stay there, in the not-now, you don’t exist in the now.
Since now is all that exists, we might say you opt out of existing at all. Until you return to what does exist, the only thing that exists (if anything does): the present, this moment, now.