I sometimes live for the moment that has not yet arrived and miss the moment that is just to about to depart. There is an undercurrent of unsettledness that pulls me even in most pleasant of moments.
When my heart was broken in pieces, so was time. Tomorrow was gone. Yesterday replayed today over and over. Today was as gone as tomorrow. Today was stolen by what yesterday took. My heartbeat did not beat in time with the past, present or future.
It takes effort at times to be in time. I do not feel grounded in the here and now. Partly because I’m not so sure what is here and what is now.
What is here? I watch myself collect and disburse over and over, minute by minute, thought by thought. I have chased here and been pursued by here. I’ve hidden from here and cried out to be found here. And in all my experiences of knowing and not knowing here, I’m still here… and I don’t even know what that is.
What is now? It’s a funny word that clings to a funny theory. It’s a fantasy world that tells me it’s real. It’s supposed to not be yesterday and tells me there is no tomorrow. It’s the second hand on a clock, a digital day, a collective consensus that says this is now. But I don’t really know what now is anymore.
But there are times I am not here and I am not now. So where am I? If there is only here and now and I am not in either one, what am I doing in a place that isn’t real according to Greenwich Mean Time? Why have I surrendered myself to a place that holds us all accountable to time, a place where we count minutes and subtract moments. I would much rather lose track of time than to be tracked by it.
Sometimes I just want to walk away from all this, but where will that leave me. What is this? What is that?
Loss has left me with so little energy to deal with the collective here and consensus of now. After I spend my day doing the daily tasks of living I’m spent. I join the world of the living and go through my day periodically checking my pulse. My heart simply isn’t in rhythm with the world that beats so fast.
When I walk the mountain trails with people, they say I walk too slow. I tell them I like to mosey. One friend says she needs to bring a pillow so she can take a nap while we walk. As we are talking I come out of the conversation and realize we are walking her pace. I am constantly pulling the back of her shirt to slow her down.
There are spiritual traditions that use a technique call walking meditation. I am not affiliated with any tradition, but I like its purpose. I tend describe my walking as reflective moseying.
In the trails where I mosey there are many anthills. I want to avoid disturbing their homes so I walk with intention. I will alter my steps to avoid taking an ant’s life that scurries under my foot. I know the preciousness of life. I know what it means to lose a life. I know what it feels like to lose a home, to lose everything. I do not want this ant to lose what I have lost, so I walk with intention.
In my reflective moseying, I look deeply into here and rest expansively into now. I notice I carry way too much into both. I mingle the weight of the day in the precarious ether of now. Things I must do. Things I didn’t do. These things are my undoing.
And in my reflective moseying I put a lot of intentionality in undoing and letting go. I used to fear being undone. In this here and this now it has become a relief and a refuge to live in the undoing. So much gets done when I am at rest in the undone.
The here is not just here. The now is not just now.
In the moments I just want to walk away (and there are many), I have come to realize I am living someone else’s here and I have chosen to get caught up in their now. Whenever I try to live in someone else’s world my world crumbles and I desperately want to escape. I don’t want to just walk away; I want to run away!
My peace comes by walking my pace, living my undoing and resting with a big sigh of relief in being undone. I don’t want to live in their world, their pace, their pleasures. Give me calm waters and still mountains. This is my here. This is my now.
Why do I take on too much when so much of life darkens me? I have my own darkness to attend to. I have my own sorrow to sort through. Why have I taken their interpretation of life and tried unsuccessfully to make it mine.
I just want to walk away sometimes. And I’ve just realized that it is not walking away I want to do. What I really want is to walk back into my here and back into my now and reflectively mosey back into my life.
Oh, if life were that simple. Who says it isn’t? I think I’ll go for a walk today.
