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I am here, it is now

August 01 2026
© John Joseph Sheehy MacSheehy © John Joseph Sheehy MacSheehy

Taking lessons from the Buddha to learn from the past and be in the present, in order to enjoy the future. By Mat Amp

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” 
– Buddha.

For me, it’s always been a struggle to balance the equation of caring and taking part in society without getting overwhelmed by the gravity of it all. In other words, how do we give enough of a fuck to take part and build relationships with people, without dissolving under the torrent of stress and pain that inevitably comes with doing that.  

Buddha’s wisdom kind of leaves me a bit conflicted, because I’ve definitely lived a little bit too much in the moment and to a large extent that didn’t end too well.

And then there is Narcotics Anonymous with its ‘one day at a time’ mantra that seems to run contrary to the very clear message in one of its own steps. That step is unequivocal about the importance of looking back through the chaotic maelstrom of our experience in the battlefield of addiction, in order to make amends to everyone that we have ever harmed.

And so, this brought me to a seminal conundrum: how do we manage to do this being in the moment thing whilst still planning for the future, as well as thinking about the mistakes we have made in the past so we can unmistake them?

Finally working this out has been one of the keys to sustaining a meaningful recovery from a long and complicated addiction to narcotics.  

Buddha is not telling us to live in the moment, but rather to exist in it – or to put it in a less poncy way – to be in it. Being in the moment is about being present, allowing our surroundings time to breathe and let us in, whereas living for the moment is about not being arsed to take part, to learn from the mistakes of the past or give a flying fuck about the ramifications of those mistakes.

And the way I see it, there are two parts to the art of being in the moment. Firstly, there’s the state of meditation in which reality disappears. I read something once about the way that Native Americans would connect to the land around them by running through it. It’s the same feeling of weightlessness that used to engulf me on a motorbike, on sunny days riding through winding roads in the countryside. But we all have to survive, and unless we’re like Greg, the Hari Krishna dude vaunted by his temple for his ability to meditate every second he was awake, we don’t have the inclination to do so. Btw, Greg was eventually found to have a brain tumour – a fascinating story you can read by Googling Oliver Sacks, ‘the last hippie’.

It seems to me that practicing meditation, in whatever form, helps us to be present in our everyday lives, to relax and ultimately to be ourselves.

There was no part of being homeless that I found easy but I learned a lot from what, without doubt, was the most difficult experience of my life. For all of the physical and mental discomfort of being homeless, there was this feeling that I’d stepped out of the matrix. It seemed really easy to see the hypocrisy and the skewed relevance people gave to meaningless shit.

I had moments when I watched people scuttling to work, kind of hurrying with a furrowed brow, wound tight and ready to snap. I had fuck all squared to my name, I was dirty, freezing and I hadn’t had a bath in weeks, but no part of me wanted to change places with any of them.

Look, I’m not pretending for a minute that I was living the lyrical life, ‘Down and out in London Town’, because when winter set in, any romantic ideas I had about homelessness froze along with the rest of me. The cold turned me into a zombie, shuffling along, no sleep, 99% numb and as good as dumb. It’s hard to live in the moment, when the moment in question is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.  

I had the craziest dream the other day. It was, initially at least, pretty stressful. People weren’t talking to me and I remember that pernicious feeling of being overwhelmed by rejection, of not being wanted. But it all switched when someone said “Oi, mate, it’s all in your head, you know that?” They handed me a pipe. I had no idea what was in it but I took a long hard hit and dissolved into a psychedelic stream of numbers. It was DMT.

I’ve done DMT in the real world a number of times and every time the experience begins in exactly this way: The moment the smoke hits my neurons, my being dissolves into a gushing stream of numbers. The crazy thing is that when I woke up I fully, 100% for real, felt like I had done DMT.

To an extent all psychoactive hallucinogens have this impact, taking us out of the pathological pathways of addiction, scooping us up and gently placing us in the feeling of being present. On the flip side of this feeling is the past with its bittersweet call of nostalgia or guilt, or a future in which you are either the president of the universe or everything has gone to shit.  

So sure, get clean, get shit done and try and learn some lessons from the road that lies behind us, but whilst doing it try to let your mind be in the moment. It’s no easy task, with the modern world set up to undermine the Buddhist way of thinking. There’s ‘created wants’, a term that describes the way marketing is designed to make us want useless shit we don’t even need. And then there is FOMO, the most fucked up concept of all time. It’s kind of like the idea that the grass is always greener in the next field.

And nowhere is this restless syndrome more evident than the empty scrolling through social media shorts, designed to distract us from the moment because we’re all scared to just sit and be.

Here… now.

< Smells like team spirit
August – September 2026 : Here and now

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