I often end my e-mails with the last words from one of my earlier works: ‘Something wonderful is about to happen!’

A couple of weeks ago I received a letter from a woman who had been reading my books and had come across the line “Something wonderful is about to happen!” Of the thousands of pieces of correspondence I receive, from time to time a note, a letter, or an email will provide an extension that is exhilarating. In her letter, she simply wanted to observe that while it was good and healthy to have hope for the future, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that something wonderful is happening.

The something wonderful that is happening is this very moment. There is no opportunity or teacher like the moment we are in right now. Brimming with possibilities, the present moment wants to be seized, enjoyed, exercised, and squeezed for every last drop it has to offer.

The thing about moments is that they don’t always come at a convenient time. Moments arrive unannounced. Important moments are particularly difficult to predict. The only real way to be prepared for both the great and difficult moments of life is to be constantly practicing present-moment awareness.

Present-moment awareness can be achieved in any number “of simple ways. You may decide that you are simply going to ask yourself over and over again, what can I do right now that will help me to become more perfectly myself? If that were the mantra of your inner dialogue, over time you would become a “master of present-moment awareness and participation. I prefer, “God, what do you think I should do in this situation?” This question has transformed my life more times that I can count—when I have had the courage to ask it.

Too often we spend our days and weeks wishing our lives away, waiting for some future experience that we have fantasized will erase all of our problems and make us happy. In the meantime, we are missing out on life, moment by moment.

The thing I love most about moments is that moments are manageable. I can manage a moment. Days, weeks, months, and years seem like eternities sometimes. If I tell myself I’m not going to eat any chocolate for a month, I begin to obsess over it. But if, when the cravings for chocolate begin to speak to me, I tell myself, not right now, I can handle that. In this way moments play a powerful role in teaching us how to make and celebrate progress.

The other wonderful thing about moments is that they provide glimpses of the-best-version-of-ourselves. There are moments in each day that I can look back on and “honestly say, “For that moment I was perfectly myself.” Not many, but some. In those moments I know I could not have handled myself any better. The more I acknowledge and celebrate those moments, and the more I seek to understand what allowed me to thrive in those moments, the more I find myself repeating them.