Is anything ever good enough for us? A few weeks ago, I was in one of the most beautiful places in the world: the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. The wind was whipping the sea into a frenzy, making swimming tricky. The day before, it had been calm, and I found myself thinking: “Why weren’t we here yesterday?”

Recently, I was at a spa, having a delicious Thai massage. I’d booked a 90-minute treatment, and I decided to have an hour-long massage followed by a half-hour facial. But I was lying there thinking: “I should have made the massage shorter and the facial longer.” I wasn’t enjoying the moment because I kept thinking of ways I could improve it.

Both times, I let myself slide out of the moment, out of an appreciation of what is here and now. That annoying little worm of dissatisfaction was repeating its wicked mantra in my head: “There’s always something better, or different, that I could be doing.”

Our consumer society is greatly to blame here: if every advert promises you success if you’d only buy this car, wear this watch, acquire this handbag, then dissatisfaction with what you have and what you are is an inevitable outcome. Putting your life on hold, in the belief that this job, this thing, this event, will magically make it all right, holds no chance of peace. Noticing what is right under your nose — which is the wonder of being alive in a world already full of possibilities — brings riches no material item ever can.

Martha Gellhorn, the war correspondent and one-time wife of Ernest Hemingway, was a close friend of mine. By the time she died in 1998, Martha was in her late eighties, but she was still as alert and fiery as a woman of 30. Her body, which finally betrayed her, had aged, but her mind never did, and I think her secret was that she always lived in the present. Not for her harking back to better times, complaining that things today weren’t as good as they had been; not for her complaining that if only this or that would happen, then her life would be magically transformed.

Most of us don’t live like this. Our mental chatter, or the civil war in our head, as Bob Geldof once memorably described it to me, goes something like this: “If only I hadn’t done that, then everything would be all right.” If you think like that — and most of us do — you end up doing things not for their own sake, but for the result you hope they will have. So, when you go to a party and manage to strike up a conversation with a hot director, you’ll be missing what he says, because what you’re actually thinking is: “Perhaps he’ll give me a job.” The party passes you by as you’re too busy concentrating on some future goal to appreciate what is going on around you.

I’m married to a lawyer. It’s his business to deal with people who arrive in his office repeating the mantra, “If only I hadn’t, if only she hadn’t . . .” When we got married, I’d come home from the office and say, “If only this hadn’t happened”, and waste hours reliving a situation. He’d calmly reply: “Well, it has happened. You can’t change it. Accept it.”

And that’s the real point: acceptance. We cannot change people, places or things — only our reactions. Someone said to me recently that thoughts of the past are generally full of resentments and thoughts of the future full of fear. How true.

Taking each day just as it comes is the true art of living. On my good days, messing about on the farm, watching a piglet trying to squeeze his chubby little body under a gate, eating a tomato I’ve grown myself, loving what I have rather than longing for what I don’t, or just hanging out with my nearest and dearest, I know exactly what Joyce Grenfell meant when she said: “There’s no such thing as time, only this very minute, and I’m in it. Thank the Lord.” All we have is this very moment: don’t throw it away, because it sure as hell isn’t coming back.

Give up city life and head for the sea, says Jo Craven

It may seem obvious that exchanging a job as features editor of Vogue in central London for a freelance life with a view of the sea would simplify things. Yet there are so many benefits I hadn’t anticipated. I love being able to see nature close up: the colours of the reeds that change every few weeks, guessing weather patterns from clouds, spotting honeysuckle coming into flower.

If that’s not feeling like you’re in the moment, then what is?

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