Bon Appetite

Bon Appetite

This article was published by The Egyptian Gazette on May 30th, 2019 

Who you become in a few years depends on what you consume today.   If you have a healthy diet and a fair amount of exercise, you will end up with a healthy, strong and fit body. If you eat junk food, stay up late and lead a lazy life style, you might probably end up fat, saggy and depressed.  But I am not talking about food only here, I am more concerned about the nutrition you give your mind. The ideas and beliefs you hold are even more crucial in determining your future well-being than the food you consume.   The books you read, the environment you place yourself in and the people you surround yourself with today combine to determine what you become in, say, five years from now. 

What are you feeding your mind today?

The person who you become in the future depends on what you are feeding your mind right now. If you want an amazing life, you must commit yourself to an ever-lasting process of learning and expanding. The easiest and most effective way to do this is reading. Reading expands your consciousness, it takes you to places and times you have not seen and might not probably have the time or the means to see in reality. A good book encapsulates the experiences of a life time of an author and introduces them to you in a nutshell; it provides you with new ideas and these are the vitamins and minerals to your mind; they re-shape it; they keep it healthy and productive and growing all the time.  

Life-enhancing books

What to read, of course, depends on your own preferences and the fields that are of interest to you… However, there are books that are essential for everyone who is after growing and developing their life in any field. I call these life-enhancing books.  The books I start to present today and intend to continue with for the next few weeks are mostly best sellers, which, I believe, is not a guarantee that a book is really good. However, these are books will sustain you through life, nurture you through the daily struggle with your existence and above all, insure a steady growth of your mind to guarantee a bright future.  

Let’s go together on a hopefully joyful journey through some good books.  It is important to say that what I present here is not a book review; it is rather based on my own experiences after reading these books; it is sort of like the fruit that I have gained from them served into your plate in case you wanted to have a taste.  To have the whole rewarding experience, I suggest you read the books yourself and savor them using your own taste buds.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

This book is a must read; it comes before any other. The book is intended to be a guide for day-to-day living; it emphasizes the importance of living only in the present moment and avoiding thoughts of the past and the future. The past is gone; it cannot be relived or altered and the future is yet to come and we have no control over it; we do not even know if we will live to see it coming. So why bother about the self-inflicted stories of the past or the yet- to- come worries of the future? Makes sense, right?

We go through our lives trapped between these two polarities:  the past and the future, sometimes totally forgetting about the present moment which is actually all the time we do have. We go about our days either thinking about all the things that went wrong in the past and the deadly mistakes we made and keep regretting them or blaming ourselves and others. Regret, blame, and guilt are poisons to our minds; they are futile emotions that lead practically nowhere.   Or we keep obsessing about the future and fearing what might go wrong with it.   We actually never enjoy the moment we are having right now.

Rarely, if not never, do we remind ourselves of the blessings we do have now. Let me take myself as an example here.   Right now I am alive and well; I am active and writing an article, which hopefully will make me feel good about myself and probably will be of some benefit to the readers. What else can I ask for before I am able to enjoy this moment?  Nothing. Why do I have to think about the hard time I had yesterday or the challenge that is awaiting me tomorrow?  Now is enough; got the idea?

 When we concentrate on what we are right now, the blessings we do enjoy, we will not need to worry or fret about the past or the future. To quote the book "Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now."   In other words, this moment is all we actually have so let’s make it count by savoring and enjoying it before it is a thing of the past.

This, however, does not mean that the book is a call for in- action or that I am urging you to neglect everything for the sake of this very hot moment.   On the contrary, what we argue for here is that the present moment is the substance of the future and the past.  Before long, writing this article will be a thing of the past. Yesterday, it was a thing of the future and I could have worried I might not be able to submit it on time.  To wrap it up, I quote a few lines from this great book to drive the idea home:

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”

I strongly recommend reading this book and wait for you next week for yet another delicious meal to feed your mind. Bon Appetite.