The Perfect Present

Many readers are familiar with the lovely book by Dr. Spencer Johnson, The Precious Present. In it a person learns to be happy by acknowledging that the present is perfect.

There are two assumptions made by the book, and there are hundreds of other books which make the same assumptions and so they are well worth analyzing.

Premise 1: A person, every person, wishes (yearns, desires, hopes, etc.) to be happy.

Premise 2: All a person has is the present (since the past and the future are out of a person’s reach).

Therefore: Be happy with the present since happiness is what you want and the present is all you have.

Happiness/contentment, therefore, is a choice one makes based on a desire for such happiness/contentment and a recognition that the present is the only raw material which can be used to generate such happiness (it can’t be anywhere else).

Does this sound circular?

Why not conclude that life is an endless source of misery, that one’s desire/yearning for happiness is nothing but a childhood fantasy and that there is nothing to find in the present but empty suffering?

The miracle of a satisfying moment lived in alignment with one’s Eternal Calling is a miracle, indeed. It is logical only if one accepts the role that one’s Neshama plays in one’s life.

The Creator conceals all miracles in just enough camouflage to provide human beings with the merit of choosing to see the miracle and not the camouflage. Here is an illustration of yet another concealed miracle.

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