Being here, now ...

There is nothing like finality to bring one into awareness and bring the present into focus. Ever since I decided to leave India and go back Down Under, I have found that the present has come into startling focus. So far, all the sights and sounds around me which to my ordered mind seemed like so much crazy chaos, now feels like glorious chaos. I go outside and revel in the variety, the multiplicity, the aliveness of life being lived out in a large disorganized city.

When I am driving, the guy who cuts into my path does not bother me anymore, I let him get his way. I wait for pedestrians to cross, cyclists to take their time and I desist from trying to teach insouciant auto-drivers lessons in safe-driving. I no longer expect courtesy from bus and lorry drivers and wait at traffic signals patiently, happily watching the swirling mass of human and vehicular (and sometimes animal) traffic dancing a gay dance of bedlam, before plunging into said bedlam with gay abandon when the lights change. Even in matters of relating to others on the personal front, things that used to disappoint or bother me before, I now view with fond acceptance. I make lists of things I must do before I leave, things I must relish one last time.

I believe, this change has come about due to the often sub-conscious and occasionally conscious thought that very soon this will not be a part of my life anymore. This single thought has changed my responses from suffering (non-acceptance) and indifference to acceptance and enjoyment.  

I guess, death too has the same effect. If we were to be told that we only have a few months to live, then we too would live life in the present, vicariously and thoroughly enjoying and relishing every moment, not sweating the small stuff, not holding on to anything, and accepting every which thing that comes our way, in full knowledge that the human experience we are going through is going to end soon and we have no clue what is going to happen thereafter.

Isn’t this how life should be lived anyway? For who knows which moment will be our last? Does any of us know our expiry date? Shouldn’t we be living as if today is the last day that has been given to us to experience human life? Immensely grateful for each moment, for the chance to express our uniqueness and humaneness in this very moment, in every moment. To live in loving acceptance of ourselves and every other self that crosses our path. To accept and embrace every human foible and flaw, every thought, no matter how dark, every emotion, no matter how painful. To live as though there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, for in reality, there isn’t.

For, the Now is too gloriously alive to be ignored and passed over. As Thoreau put it so well in ‘Walden’, “ In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.” Amen.