While flying back home from Christmas vacation last night, I had a “Tollegasm” on the plane, after reading the following passage. The context of this quote is that Eckhart Tolle is explaining the apparent conflict between living in the moment and achieving big, hairy, audacious goals. How can you achieve greatness if your attention is focussed only on things in the Now?

The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power. Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power. Or it may be more true to say that it then has access to you and through you to this world.

– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

An average person is someone who thinks that the past and the future are more important than the present. Approach anxiety, procrastination, risk aversion, poor concentration, absent-mindedness, and virtually every other form of self-created misery are possible only when you let your thoughts and actions be dominated by something outside this eternal instant. When you direct your attention to the needs of this moment, every action unfolds into the field of intention. It’s hard to articulate the energy behind this flow, but you know it when you feel it.

It’s easy to sense when somebody’s living outside the present moment. When you talk to them, all they ever say is, “Oh yeah…Yeah…Uh huh…Cool…Haha…Yeah.” When you walk by them on the street, the look on their face adopts a kind of pedophilia: zoned out, morose, disconnected, an undercurrent of anger and frustration pushing its way out through their bulging eyes. They complain and criticize as if talk without action were something that mattered. And they spend a lot of time talking about a day that exists on nobody’s calendar: Someday.

Every big problem is really just a large collection of tiny problems grouped together and labeled. Success isn’t about doing big things, it’s about doing small things. When every fibre of your being is invested into solving this little problem in this little moment, you haven’t just increased your chances of reaching your goal–you’ve already achieved it.