The ongoing wow is happening now.
That’s a quote from the Richard Linklater movie Waking Life which
touches on philosophy, dreams, life, death and ourselves. If you have an extra
101 minutes lying around I highly suggest you spend it on this film.
That line specifically; the ongoing wow is happening now
speaks to me because I’ve always had a hard time keeping myself in the now…or the
present, even though I knew that’s where all the action was.
By a show of hands, how many find it hard to stay anchored in
the now when the currents of the past or the future crash against you and throw
you off course?
It seems like we’re always vacillating between the past and
the future so much that we’re never able to experience the ongoing wow doesn’t
it?
Our past especially, for whatever reason, has a massive
gravitational pull on us.
We’ll obsessively sort through it the same way emergency
response crews dig through the rubble of a building after an earthquake. We spend
hours ruminating over people, places or events that we can no longer alter, save or
improve upon.
It seems the only thing that can rip us from the mental
bondage of our past is the high octane charge of anxiety we get when thinking
or worrying about the future.
We’ll fret over events on our horizon that have yet to pass
such as an upcoming physical at the doctors, a performance evaluation at work
or wondering what kinda crap we’re gonna pull out of our asses during table
topics at our next Toastmasters meeting.
And when we’re not dreading real events, then we put
ourselves in all sorts of fictitious dilemmas, arguments & confrontations with people and
situations that may or may not even exist. This type of future fearing, by the
way, is usually done in the shower or when we’re driving our car.
In fact, I bet a lot of you couldn’t even tell me how you
got here today because your mind was anywhere but in the present. All
you know is that you got in the car, started driving, thought about an argument
where you SHOULD’VE said something differently, wondered when and how you were
going to die and then, voila, you ended up at this meeting.
Our minds love to be anywhere but in the now and we’re
constantly held hostage to it and its whims.
It’s like we’re tied up sitting on
the back of a stallion and then someone fires a gun (bang!) and that horse
gallops all over the place while we not only try to keep from falling off, but
remain helpless to where it runs off to.
So what is it about the now that makes it so hard to stay in
it?
Allow me to paint a picture: On one side we have the past. .
It’s a desert wasteland with dilapidated buildings, broken down cars and homes
that are in a perpetual state of rot & decay. Even though nothing in it grows & everything is dead, all of it is familiar and eerily comforting.
On the other side is the future, an ever-changing ether of
blues & greens and black with some distant twinkling lights. You can try to
grab a hold of it, but it’s impossible to get a solid grip because it hasn’t
yet solidified. It has a vague sense of promise to it with the constant echoes of “what if, what if, what if...”.
Separating these two lands is a raging river of clean,
infinite, vibrating energy. This is the present.
For me personally, the thought of diving into and staying in
that river of the present seemed very…tense, overwhelming and intimidating, even though I knew
that was the best place to be.
So I decided no matter how difficult, awkward or foreign it
felt, I was going to try my hardest to always remain in it. And then, I jumped in…
At first its force felt like a roller coaster. The raw
inertia made me feel like I had to brace myself to keep from being swept away.
After I got used to it, it became a smooth flow and every
moment had this frenetic, pyrophoric charge to it. Everything was broadcast in bright, crystal
clear high-definition.
I didn’t feel like life was passing me by anymore, but
making me a part of it. For the first
time I no longer felt like I needed to be in a rush because I didn’t feel like
I was losing time, I was experiencing it to its maximum potential.
I realized by keeping a constant focus on the present, I
didn’t have time to go to the past to try to work on things that were unfixable
or run and get lost in the anxious murkiness of the future.
I was too preoccupied
by being a part of the ongoing wow.
By paying attention to the present it enabled me to create a past that wouldn’t
haunt me and contribute to a future that had more stability.
Paying attention to the now is the only part of life that
matters because it’s the only part we’re absolutely sure about.
So if you think you’d like to become a part of the ongoing
wow but are faced with a giant HOW? I have a few tips for you.
The first; concentrate on your breathing. It’s the best way to keep you in the present
and not get slowed down by the past or sped up by the future.
Your breath is the
best instrument in assuring you that you’re right here, right now. It’s the
real-time metronome to your soul, there’s no 30 second delay to it. As you
breathe, the now is happening.
Second ; notice when you find yourself mulling over things
past or future. Once you realize you’re
focusing on anything but the present, visualize a huge chalk board and it’s
packed full of frenzied words scrawled all over it.
Then visualize erasing the entire board to a clean slate and
the only words allowed on it are ones that describe what’s happening now, once
they’ve passed, you erase them in preparation for the next words to describe
the next moment. And so on and so on and so on…
Lastly, some food for thought; just as are bodies reflect
what we eat, our moods reflect what we think. When we’re shouldering the
burdens of our past or running on empty from the angst of the future, it
affects us negatively in the now and when that happens, the mind is a terrible
thing to taste.
Just as we watch what goes in our bodies, we should also
watch what we allow in our heads. Our
thoughts, after all, are the foundation of our emotional nutrition.
When we’re in the now
we’re feeding ourselves with the freshest parts of life. It’s like sinking our
teeth into the ripest piece of fruit and letting it nourish our mind, body and
spirit.
As I bring this series of moments to a close, It’s my
sincerest hope that even if it was just for a little while, we were all able to
be together and be a part of THIS ongoing wow which is ending...now.
