I have always had difficulty living in the moment. It’s something I have struggled with my entire life. It isn’t something with emotional roots so much as just being the way my brain is wired — there are both pluses and minuses to this — but there are certainly emotional ramifications. Ever since I was a child, I have taken in a lot of information from the peripheral, sometimes impacting the central focus of my attention. Often, I would simply drift away, trying to retain my connection to what was happening while being pulled somewhere else entirely. But I recognize the importance of the moment, of the experience of being there in life.

When I drift, it is not always a bad thing; in fact, I am often very invested in what is going on, but I begin extrapolating in my mind and that can take me somewhere totally disconnected from what is actually happening. The effect is an offshoot of the rich fantasy life I had from the beginning. In my earliest memories, I was already a storyteller and could lose myself for hours in imaginary worlds or alternate lives. While I remember slow days, it is hard to recall being bored in my youth. But it is easy to pull up memories of being distracted, antsy, eager to be somewhere else.

In grade school, I was not particularly academically challenged, but I was also not wholly invested in my lessons. In the middle of a math test, my mind would wander elsewhere; I would try to be attentive, but my note taking progressively betrayed me. By the time I was in college, my class notes were filled more with poetry and sketches than any transcriptions of my professors’ words. Those pages are a document of my tangential thinking, the intellectual wanderings typical of how I often experience the world, the slight disconnect to being directly in the “now.”

As a kid, I discovered theatre; acting became a way for me to fully realize a moment, artificial or otherwise, that was truly immersive and my own. I felt a great sense of focus and being while on stage. (Sometimes in my fantasy worlds, alone walking in the woods, I could experience the same level of immersion, a oneness with the surrounding Universe that felt completely empowering, but unsharable, un-communal, ultimately lonely.) The proscenium typified a distance between myself and what was really happening in the world. I was a great observer, a seer of the bigger picture, broader in view and yet occasionally oblivious to things that were going on right in front of me. Not because I was blind or because I didn’t care, but because I simply wasn’t fully present.

In my “young adult” years, which for me started early but certainly stretched into my twenties, when I was present, I was deeply present. The older I got, the more it leveled out. But the more it leveled out, the more I began to dwell part time in the future and part time in the past. Making plans, dwelling on regrets. Thinking too much about life after achieving my goals, not working enough on the process of actually completing my goals; bathing in nostalgia rather than letting go and moving on. Nothing wrong with enjoying memories and having dreams, but neither should impede progress in life.

But even when “living in the moment” is challenging, sometimes that moment will still catch up to you.

My “catch up” moment happened about a year and a half ago, with a call from my physician about an X-ray she ordered to rule out pneumonia. In September of 2014, I was 46 years old and about to face a diagnosis of Stage IV lung cancer — a diagnosis that would take until November to definitively arrive at, but for which I immediately began to prepare. Yesterday was my 48th birthday, significant to me, perhaps, more than any other birthday I have had, because one year ago there were plenty of people who believed (whether they gave voice to it or not) that I likely would be gone from this world by now. There was good reason for them to be skeptical of my long-term participation in this endless melodrama of existence. After all, Dr.s Google and Bing had ready statistics showing I would die quickly. And if I didn’t, at the very least I would wither away and barely cling to life for whatever pitiful years or months I had left.

Yet I feel great (if tired), happier than I have been in years, and much, much more present in everything that I do. Certainly, my 47th birthday, just a few months after my official diagnosis and staging, was wrought with conflicting emotions and felt somehow profound. But it is 48 that resonates. And while I believe I have a solid chance of getting through a few more decades of this mortal coil, it has been the last 18 months that have afforded me the greatest perspective on being in the moment.

It was in the moment that I celebrated yesterday. Quietly, for the most part, though with plenty of help from friends near and far. Voices from my various pasts made themselves present throughout the day through social media and modern technology, each bringing with it a uniquely specially joy. I have embraced the whole notion of birthday celebration, reveling in the concept of my own personal holiday, most unusually for me as a person who has traditionally forgotten my own birthday or simply ignored it. And it is in the moment that I will continue celebrating this milestone year. And next year. And the year after that.

I know it will continue to be a struggle. Being present in the moment is not easy. Work distracts us. Dreams distract us. Memory distracts us. Fatigue. Worry. Fear. Doubt. Stress. Anger. Despair. All these things get in our way, cloud our view. Obscure our joy. Even as things may be getting better all the time, and I’ve got to believe they are getting better, it is perhaps more important to remember that “catch up” moment. I want to live in my joy, to notice it in the smallest details and hold it close every day. I want to be aware. I want to be awake.

And so I struggle to keep my focus without losing my peripheral vision. I work to retain my dreams while also pounding away at my goals, step by step. And I don’t forget to experience gratitude for being remembered, for it is these connections that bind me to the here and now, letting me know that there is no richer place to be than this.