There’s one sure way to live in the present and that is to have no past or future. In the language of the Hopi Indians, for instance, life in the eternal present is reflected by an absence of past, present, and future tenses. Words for seasons, whether winter or summer, are not nouns that indicate separate sections of time. They are descriptive words, reflecting the condition of the continuous but also changing nature of the present time.
Life transitions for the Hopi are also unmarked by the strict time divisions of our chronological categories. In our culture, one minute we are single and free of family responsibility, but the moment after our wedding we are committed for life to one person and the children we’ll bear. In the Hopi culture, marriage includes more than two dozen events spaced out over an entire year.
The value of understanding the Hopi way is, in part, so those of us who tend to ignore what is going on right now can get our attention off the horizon and on to watching where we are.
Whatever we are undertaking at the moment is the most important thing we can do.