“If you are missing something or someone in life, you are living in the past.” – Chetlur S Prasad

There was a period when I quietly ached for things that had already ended. A role I no longer held. A relationship that had changed. A season of life that had simply moved on. I called it nostalgia and thought it was harmless. Looking back, it was not. It was a slow, steady drain, pulling my attention out of the room I was actually standing in.

The realisation came on an ordinary evening. I was sitting with people who mattered to me, in a moment that deserved my full attention. But my mind had quietly wandered elsewhere, back to a person, a place, a time that no longer existed. I was physically present but mentally elsewhere. That unsettled me more than I expected. I had been so busy missing something that I had stopped noticing what was right in front of me, waiting to be lived.

That is when I began to see the pattern clearly. Missing is not memory. Memory visits and leaves. Missing stays. I noticed it showed up in small moments, a certain song, an empty chair, a silence where a voice used to be. Instead of following it backwards, I started asking a different question. Not “what is missing,” but “what is here.” Some days the answer was small. A conversation. A quiet meal. A task I could still do well. But naming it, each time, slowly loosened the grip the past had on me.

What surprised me most was how much lighter the present felt once I stopped comparing it to memory. I was simply letting today be enough, without asking it to compete with yesterday. And in that shift, I could finally enjoy what was actually in front of me.

Key Learning: Missing someone or something is attention misplaced. What you are missing already had its time. What you are living has not yet had its chance.

Chetlur S Prasad
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