A man was being chased by a ferocious tiger. He ran until he came to a sheer cliff. As the tiger came bearing down on him, he grabbed a rope hanging over the cliff and climbed down out of the tiger’s reach. The man looked up and saw the tiger leering at him, waiting to devour him. Then he looked down below the cliff. There was a deadly drop to the rocks of over five hundred feet. Then he looked up and saw two mice beginning to chew the rope. What should he do? The tiger above, the rocks below, and the rope about to break! Just then he saw a bright red strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff. He stretched out his hand, plucked the strawberry and popped it into his mouth. The juices of the strawberry were so sweet that as he ate he couldn’t contain himself. “Delicious, that’s the best strawberry I ever tasted!”
Had the man been preoccupied with the tiger (the past) or preoccupied with the future (the rocks below), he would never have enjoyed the strawberry, which we could call “the gift of the present.”