In one way or the other, all traditions of inner wisdom stress on the importance of being in the present moment. But very few of us are actually able to strike peace between ourselves and Now.
In fact, we try to erect walls between Now and us, whenever Now wants us to experience ourselves through it. My own obsession to read when I have nothing else to do made me aware of this.
I read the newspaper while eating, the shampoo bottle instructions while brushing teeth, books, essays blogs…it was endless. And then like all obsessions, mine had its fallout too. I strained my eyes and was advised strictly to keep off any visual strain for a while unless I could accept serious repercussions to my sense of sight. Furthermore, I was expecting a baby and required to rest all the more which meant I had to stay stationary mostly.
I felt devastated. I couldn’t move or read! So I resorted to listening to music. For a while it was engaging, then it got boring. I had heard all my favourite songs one by one, over and over. What now?
Perhaps, Now was bent on removing all the walls I kept erecting between it and myself. I turned grumpy at the sound of so much music in my head when I’d wake up in the morning or when the lights went out (a very frequent situation in my country) and everything was quiet. Besides, the music, even though it was my favourite, was not giving me peace. One day I gave up all resistance. I started looking around my room and noticed meaningless, trivial beauty that I had never noticed otherwise. The erratic but beautiful dust patterns on the wall outside the window from rivulets of past many rains. The gentle swaying of the blinds to the breeze. A distant unfamiliar bird humming every few moments, a lawnmower whizzing far off. The vendor in the street doing his elaborate chant in a musical voice words of which I couldn’t quite catch. As I ate, I held up a slice of cucumber up to the light and was fascinated by the design of the smooth whorls in the cross section. They seemed to make a perfect flower. At 31 years of age I had never before noticed the enchantment in a slice of cucumber.
Strangely, I felt more relaxed as I let the senses wholesomely take in what was around rather than feeding them my own selective concoctions.
Today when I can read and move again, my cherished memories do not include the papers I’ve scoured over at the dinner table, or the books I’ve read no matter how precious. The memories instead are ones that have delighted the senses. The ones where I let what was around fascinate me. The most powerful image that comes to mind is when on a university picnic on the beach, I ventured to a spot where the waves were gently bobbing and I bobbed along neck deep in seawater, all by myself and Now. My feet gently touched the earth, the warm water seemed to cloak me in comfort and the receding sun threw its golden light all over me and the water. It became a sacred, timeless moment etched in my mind’s eternity. That precious moment was a peak into the delight we deny ourselves every day.
Perhaps we all need to experience the magic of Now when it presents an opportunity for us to experience ourselves. In the traffic jam, on the morning jog, in the darkness of an electrical outage, in the chaos at the airport terminal waiting for the delayed flight to resume…rather than resist with your little weapons; the iPods and the iPads, sink into the Now. It will be phenomenal I promise you.