my problems with staying in the moment are all about worrying and projecting into the future, working out all possible scenarios for unfolding events, extrapolating outcomes based on the flimsiest of evidence, and trying to do a myriad of things right now to cover all possible "bad outcomes", control, control, control......
so one day at a time means tackling that to me.
I have to combine it with "doing the next right thing". So that 1 day at a time does not mean I run around in an irresponsible state refusing to budget for obvious future expenses, nor do I stick my head in the sand over other things that have obvious and predictable consequences.
I have to stop obsessing on how everything "will be" because the fact is for complex things, especially those that depend on the will and behaviour of others, there is no way to know. The future is like chaos theory, butterflies flapping their wings leading to hurricanes, and it is only in retrospect you can see the connections.
I have a tendency to think in extremes:
e.g. If its good in this moment, it will always be fabulous, if it's bad in this moment, it will always be a disaster.
Clearly you can't extrapolate the future like that, so I have to stay in today for those things.
I have hopes and dreams, I also have plans and a general direction of travel that I think I would like for my life. But I need flexibility to deal with life as it rolls on in even if those plans and dreams then appear to become obsolete. That involves taking things one day at a time.
1 day at a time does not mean (to me) that I forget the past: I use the slowly unfolding patterns and evidence of what has actually occurred, and the direction of travel of events build a picture that gives me information about what I need to do today and more of (but never complete) idea about what the future holds.
1 day at a time does not mean (to me) that I stay in situations that are unacceptable just because right now is ok, or because I don’t know what the future holds. It does not let me off the hook with taking control of my life right now.
This is all hard, when I forced myself through the door of al-anon, and after a while started understanding how people were getting serenity, I understood that I was going to have to turn my entire way of looking at the world on it's head and thought that I would have to throw out everything I knew.
I wanted to freeze the world so that I could learn these things without ,life crashing on ahead around me. Good news was that I didn't have to be perfect at it, and the more I practiced and read and asked and reached out, the more the changes in thinking occurred, snowballing and supporting each other. Plus I didn't have to re-learn everything, some things just needed tweaking a little
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