Everything that unfolds unfolds now, and so might be said to unfold in the nowscape. We’ve already observed how nature unfolds only and always in the now. The trees are growing now. The birds are flying through the air or sitting in the branches only now. The rivers and the mountains are in the now. The ocean is in the now. The planet itself is turning now. One physicist, writing about Einstein and time, observed that change in something is the way we measure time, and anything that changes in a regular way can therefore be called a clock. In fact, it is more accurate to be saying that change is the way we measure time than to say that time is the way we measure change, since time is in and of itself such a mystery. Everything changes, and so there is time. Everything changes, and so we experience time. Everything changes, and so we can experience change by stepping outside of time for a moment, and becoming intimate with what is, beyond the abstraction that is the mystery of time.
Time flows, time is passing, but we do not know what time is. And for us, when we ask what time it is, there is only one answer, and it shapes the moment no matter what Big Ben or your alarm clock or your watch, or the Grand Canyon, is telling you. Guess what? Once again, it is now.
The tiniest bit of reflection will make it evident to you that the present moment is the only moment we ever have in which to be alive. Perhaps that realization, seemingly so self-apparent and trivial, needs to sink in and drop deep down into our psyche, into the wellspring of our own hearts. But it is actually very hard to take it in fully, to really fathom it. There is no time other than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. Life will never be more rich in some other moment than it is in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings, it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. It too will be a moment that can be very easily missed, just as easily missed as this one. And it too will be subject to continual change and the vagaries of all the causes and conditions that gave rise to it in previous moments.
In that sense, wherever we go, wherever we are, whatever is happening, and no matter what time it is or what the calendar says, we always have only moments to live.
And so, we might be drawn, somehow, to make the best use of our moments that we can, while we can, to be available to them. At first, that usually requires making an effort to pay attention in and to the present moment. Why? Because it is so quickly gone, and because it is so easy to get caught up in the landscapes of the senses and the mind and fixated on their various inhabitants and energies and very quickly lose touch with ourselves, with others, and with the world. We can spin off into the future, rail about the past, think that things will be OK someday provided this happens and that doesn’t happen, all of which may be true to one degree or another, but it still has you missing your life, and in a sense, all life.
You could think of that as the Great Escape. We exit from the sensescapes and the mindscape, from the nowscape, in our desperate attempts to escape. It is a maneuver we engage in all too frequently, whenever things are not to our liking… and, ironically, even when they are. So we can either inhabit the inner and outer landscapes of the mind and the body and the world, not really separate, or we can pursue the Great Escape and forget that our lives are as continually and wonderfully pregnant with possibility as they are, even in the most difficult and trying of times. And, that they are not to be missed.
The senses can wake us up, and they can also lull us to sleep. The mind can wake us up, or it too can lull us to sleep. The senses unfold only in the present, but in an instant they can catapult us into memory or into anticipation, and thus into endless and usually unhelpful preoccupation with the past, what did or didn’t happen and how that all affects “me” now; or obsession with the future and all its worrying and planning for a better now later, when we might let down and be who we really are but don’t have time to be now.
In the process, the present moment, the only moment we have, can get severely squeezed, to the point of hardly ever being seen or felt or known, or for that matter, used. It is only mindfulness that can reconstitute it and return us to it and it to us, for indeed, there is no difference between these. We and the nowscape are always here and never two. But this actuality can only be felt. It cannot be fathomed by thought alone because lived, experiential dimensions of it get denatured in the very process of thinking. It cannot be reduced to thought because it cannot be reduced at all. Now is that fundamental. And so are you.
This is not to say that we cannot or should not care about the future and work hard for necessary social change, for greater justice and economic freedom, for greater ecological balance and for a more peaceful world for all sentient beings. Nor does it mean that we should become apathetic and not work to accomplish our purposes and realize our visions and our dreams. It does not mean that we cannot continue to work at learning, growing, healing, and mobilizing our creative imagination and energies for our own benefit and happiness, as well as for the contributions we make to the worlds of others by the work we do and just by loving life. It is rather that if we, understandably, desire the future to be different, either on the large national, international, social, or geopolitical scale of things or in terms of improving our own life situation and that of our community, or just getting done what most needs getting done, there is only one time we ever have to influence that future.
For now is already the future and it is already here. Now is the future of the previous moment just past, and the future of all those moments that were before that one. Remember back in your own life for a moment, to when you were a child, or an adolescent, or a young adult, or to any other period already gone. This is that future. The you you were hoping to become, it is you. Right here. Right now. You are it. Don’t like it? Who doesn’t like it? Who is even thinking that? And who wants “you” to be better, to have turned out some other way? Is that you you too? Wake up! This is it. You have already turned out.
But, and it is a big but, do you know who you are fully, right now, in this moment? That is the question. That is what mindfulness is all about, because this really is it. Mindfulness is an ongoing inhabiting of the nowscape. It is a wakefulness that lies beyond being continually caught in liking and disliking, wanting and rejecting, and in destructive and unexamined emotional habits and thought patterns, no matter how important the issue, no matter how little or how great the stakes. Imagine working in and for the world from such a vantage point, with that kind of perspective. That might be a worthy assignment, a worthy challenge we could proffer ourselves and practice embodying in the world in this very moment, right here, today.
Each moment of now is what we could call a branch point. We do not know what will happen next. The present moment is pregnant with possibility and potential. When we are mindful now, no matter what we are doing or saying or working on or experiencing, the next moment is influenced by our presence of mind, and is thus different from how it would have been had we not been paying attention, had we been caught up in some whirlpool or other within the mind or body or the outer landscape. So, if we wish to take care of the future that, when we get there, will also be now, the only way we can do that is to take care of this future of all past moments and efforts, namely, the present. The only way we can do that is to recognize each moment as a branch point and realize that it makes all the difference in how the world, your world, and your one wild and precious life, will unfold. We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.
This should be ample incentive to act with integrity and presence and with kindness and compassion for ourselves and for others. Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.
Not a bad reason to practice being here for it. That is what formal meditation practice, which we will now visit in Part 2, is all about.