A Life Measured in Moments: Don’t Postpone Your Peace

By Maharishi Krishnananda Ishaya

The average human spends just under eighty years on Earth. To the mind, that sounds generous — a long story filled with chapters yet to be written. But look closer,and those years dissolve into fragments: twenty-six of them asleep, seven more struggling to fall asleep, thirteen at work, eleven staring into glowing screens. Even eating — that ancient ritual of sustenance and pleasure — quietly claims four and a half.

When we subtract all that is required simply to sustain the body or fulfill society’s demands, what remains? A handful of years, perhaps, that could be called truly our own. The hours of wonder, of laughter, of deep conversation and quiet reflection —these are the rare coins of consciousness amid the currency of habit.

And yet, to the awakened mind, this arithmetic does not depress but clarifies. For life is not measured by its duration but by the depth of awareness within it. A single minute lived in full presence outweighs a year sleepwalking through routine. The tragedy is not that we sleep, work, or eat — these are sacred acts when done consciously. The tragedy is that we so rarely inhabit them.

Time is not our enemy but our mirror. It shows us what we value, what we repeat, and what we postpone. Perhaps the real task is not to escape the ordinary, but to infuse it with presence — to awaken within those twenty-six years of sleep, those thirteen years of labor, those eleven years of distraction.

Then life ceases to be a countdown, and becomes instead a continuous unfolding —not of years, but of awareness.

Don’t Postpone Your Peace

We spend our lives waiting — for the right time, the right person, the right conditions. We imagine peace as something to be earned, achieved, or stumbled upon once the chaos subsides. But the truth is far simpler and more startling: peace is not a future event, it is a present recognition.

The mind thrives on postponement. It says, “I’ll rest when things calm down,” yet it is the very movement of thought that keeps the waters stirred. Peace does not arrive after the storm; it is discovered in the eye of it — the still point untouched by the winds of circumstance.

Look closely, and you’ll see that postponement is a habit of fear — the fear that if we stop striving, life will collapse. But life doesn’t require our tension to continue. The breath flows, the heart beats, the earth turns — all without our anxious effort.

To not postpone peace is to stop insisting that something must change before we can be whole. It is to allow this moment — imperfect, incomplete, and beautifully alive —to be enough.

The invitation is not to add anything new, but to remove the delay. Right here, before the next thought, peace waits — not as a reward, but as your natural state.