Living This Now Moment

“We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I’m talking and you’re listening, is eternity.” – Alan Watts

Well, we’ve reached it
again.
Now.
Did you expect it to be more?

Now.
Such that it is.
Our time; our only time.
Make it shine.

I thought about Sal and Dean and those other characters moving from coast-to-coast and back again chasing the next thing in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In some ways, that’s all of us, isn’t it? Chasing the next thing, always going somewhere else in the future.

I’ve tried to turn that into making exceptional nows out of otherwise mundane nows. Visiting waterfalls is one way, but so is getting up early and watching the sky gradually brighten as the world wakes up anew. And so is walking out in the woods just to see what a winter with no snow smells and feels like out there. Eternity is watching a squirrel sort out how to get into a squirrel-proof feeder. And it’s the next wave swelling to meet the retreating salty foam undermining your feet in the surf. A poem stacked together just so.

This is our little bit of eternity, living this now moment. We either spin it up with wonder and magic or we ignore it at our peril. For it won’t come this way again.

Happy Monday.