Thursday, March 13, 2008

Past, Future, or NOW

I'm getting ready to go on vacation, twenty days of bliss - I hope. It's like anything I approach with a great deal of expectancy, I set myself up for "surprises" of the frustrating variety. I read a good quote recently, "Expectations are pre-planned resentments." I've been trying to remind myself of that lately and it helps. Focusing in on the now of my life has become my new project. I'm reading an excellent book on the topic, Echart Tolle's The Power of Now. As I've been reading, I'm becoming so aware of how readily my overly-active mind defaults to the past or even more often, to the future and how seldom I am grounded in the present moment, which, as Tolle points out so eloquently, is the only reality. No wonder my memory is so poor - I've generally been somewhere else on the time-continuum than where I literally was. Amazing.

In the Middle Ages, I recently read, before the invention of the mechanical clock, the average individual had little idea what day or month or year it was, when they were born and consequently how old they were. Their entire concept of time was what they discerned from the daily activities of nature. What would it be like to live like that, so unaware of time? Today we're run ragged by the its demands and so aware of the aging process that we can scarcely enjoy any one stage because we're busy dreading or anticipating the next.

I also recently read an interesting interpretation of the symbolism of the two thieves who died on the crosses on either side of Jesus. One represented the past and the other the future. If you read the comments they hurled forth, you can see this. Jesus' response, His comfort, was in the word "Today." "Today, you will be with me in Paradise." Preoccupation with the past or the future, or both, robs us of the enjoyment, the insight, the consciousness we're supposed to have with our glorious Present. When we live fully in the moment, we are partaking of Eternity in a very real way. I like that. That's better than a vacation actually.