Two quotes from Mazu, 709–88, one of the greatest of the ancient Chinese Chan (Zen) masters, to remind us to live in the immediacy of the present moment and not in how our thoughts tell us what our life should be like:

When successive thoughts do not await one another,

and each thought dies peacefully away,

this is called absorption in the oceanic reflection.

A monk asked, “What is the essential meaning of Buddhism?”

Mazu said, “What is the meaning of this moment?”