No one has to master living in the now. It’s impossible to live anywhere else. Just as you can never leave now, no one will ever take away your past or withhold your future. Effortlessly, your past accumulates. Instantly, your future arrives. What matters is that you notice your life while you can still call it “alive”. That’s now.
Karen Maezen Miller, Hand Wash Cold
Busyness pervades every aspect of modern life, often presented as a virtue or even a benchmark which demonstrates that we are succesful. In this poem, Mary Oliver reminds us that it comes to us from outside – it is “offered” to us. We can have a lot to do each day. However, busyness or “speeding up” comes from our relationship to what we have to do. We do not have to accept it but can protect ourselves from it by creating space. It does not have to be as extreme as the Chines poets . It can be quite simply some quiet time each day, or some time in nature.
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
Mary Oliver, The Old Poets of China
Happiness is like a butterfly:
the more you chase it, the more it will elude you.
But if you turn your attention to other things,
it will come and sit softly on your shoulder
Thoreau
The quality in our life is related to where we place our attention. We go of all the things that are cluttering our minds, and free up space and time to live each moment and each encounter with others more fully. This is true for each moment, but also sets the tone for the values which we choose, the direction we are going.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:21
What is important is not what someone is
but what they are waiting for.
Not the events of life, but its possibilities.
Dorothee Solle
Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way
— on purpose, in the present moment,
and without judgment.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Normally, fantasies are spinning out , one after another, usually about being someplace else or being different from what we are right now. What about a moment of stopping and checking whether this is going on right now? Simply waking up this moment to what is taking place right now, opening up to……nothing special. Just wind blowing, windows rattling, birds calling, breath flowing in and out, bright sunlight flowing through the shades making patterns on the floor. When that happens it is clear that no wishing has brought it about! Being here and now in unadorned simplicity is our true state – whole and inseparable from anything else.
Toni Parker, The Silent Question
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