<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -->

Tonight, John and I had Chinese take-out.

Orange Chicken? Scrumptious.

Spicy Kung Pao. Any day of the week.

Lo Mein. Yummy.

While a tasty Chinese dinner satiates my palate, nothin beats that Fortune-telling delight to finish it off.

I love fortune cookies. While I do notice whether the cookie's fresh and crunchy or old and chewy, it's pretty irrelevant to the fortune inside that predicts my fate.

At times, I'll freely admit, I've found myself searching desperately for any sign of Hope. Yup... even a fortune cookie.

Diggin into the now (almost) empty bag which enveloped the cartons containing the tasty Chinese dinner, I reach in to grab the fortune-telling cookie.

There's no mistaking these cookies are predestined for their recipient. You know the rules. Whichever cookie is pointing toward any given person, that's the one that predicts our future.

Mine read:

"You will have full contentment by summer's end." I taped it to my computer.

More often than not, I find myself latching onto something in the future as holding the promise of hope. But in my mind, I know how critical it is for me to stay in the present. In the moment. All I have is right now. If my mind is so fixated on what "tomorrow" might bring, what happens to today? What am I missing out on this very second? I've discovered that I miss all of the promising things that our Now has to offer.

The longest stretch of highway, they say, is from the mind to the heart.

I'm working on living in the Now.