Now and Then

On the last day of the year, David Whyte posted what he called “a rebellious little New Year’s gift.” There was no vulgarity, no anarchic foaming at the mouth. Whyte simply went about dismantling the overuse, indeed the deification, of the word Now “to free the word from its recent almost puritanical imprisonment.” He stopped me in my tracks. I realized that at least since the advent of Eckhart Tolle’s blockbuster The Power of Now in 1997, but likely all the way back to Ram Dass in 1971, I had become attached to Now as a lazy shorthand for the Divine without even being aware of it, without examining it or considering whether I really believed it. I’d been sold a bill of goods, a reduction in the dimensions of meaning. Today, I am considering the possibility that this wholesale undervaluing of history, of memory, of space/time itself has the flavor of socialist realism, of burying the richness, the texture of the human enterprise in jargon. It might even have political implications as part of the dumbing down of discourse. Whyte’s suggestion that “the call to live in the now is always accompanied by a grim form of dressed up puritanism” reminded me of my experience of previous instances of purification in the service of denying complexity, making concepts that take a lifetime to comprehend into a pill that is easy to digest. All binaries have that characteristic. This is good, this is bad. The Now is where it’s at. Forget about the rest of it. Everything else dilutes and undermines the presentness of the present.

Photo by Daniel Gaffey on Unsplash

This a very radicalizing idea for me. It had not occurred to me that focusing on the present as we do in meditation might be more complicated than I have understood and might have unexpected implications. The idea somehow suggests that there can't be any temporal depth to mindfulness, that the parade of the generations is meaningless because all that really matters is this flash of awareness which we all know can’t be grasped or held on to. I look at our fiftysomething sons with their dawning health concerns and early glimpses of aging and I’m so moved by that. I’m moved to tears. I look at their children in their teens and twenties at various stages of making their way in the world and my heart goes out to them. Life is hard and they have good lives. I look at the great- grandchildren and I know that now will never be long enough. To yearn, to remember is human. Otherwise, how do we explain art, how do we explain our intuition of the holy?

Is, was, will be Moses heard at the Burning Bush. But when I consider the will be part, the future, I come up empty. At almost eighty years of age, I am heading in the direction of death, as we all are and that is the future I’m called to contemplate. When I engage with the Now, I’m not only including the past in all its ornate, technicolor content. I am also including the future which I am called to investigate as an entomologist looks at a beetle under a magnifying glass. Who am I? Who have I been and who or what will I become?

We are balanced here on the pinhead of Allness and Nothingness, always a precarious place to find oneself. In order for the Now to breathe into the fullness of our lived experience, it must paradoxically contain all of what is, what was and what will be and we’ll have to become adept at tasting all those layers. This must be what Thich Nhat Hahn meant when he talked about the rain and sunshine contained in a simple piece of white paper. Now is the seed that gave rise to the tree that gave itself to make the paper. Now is the cloud that hovers over the tree in the forest before the rain falls. Now is the great-grandchild who draws a picture of a tree in Magic Markers on the piece of white paper.

***********************************************************************************************************

Many Voices will now accept contributions from all subscribers. At this critical time, we need to hear what everyone has to say. Please let me know if you have work that you would like to send to seventysomething for our Many Voices feature. Make your voice heard.

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething and have access to the archives. Your ideas are always welcome.

*************************************************************************************************************

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.