Waking to life

No matter how often I walk along my favorite country road, the experience is never quite duplicated. For certain, it is the same road; likewise, I am living the same life I’ve been experiencing since birth, and likely, beyond. But every new moment delivers difference—from preceding and following moments—and this difference invites entry into the portal of the present moment.

As author Clark Strand reminds us in the January 2005 issue of the locally produced Yoga International magazine, “This moment will never come again. The next moment, too, will never come again. And the next. There is an endless succession of unrepeatable events.”

The practice one employs to gain the miracle of the moment is awareness. With simple noticing, we bring ourselves squarely into this most living moment of our lives. And so, I pass the cabin, predictably nestled in its place, but today, a downy woodpecker drills the trunk of a dead tree, and flees to safety at my approach. Tomorrow, I find human prints in the snow, slightly longer than my own, and those of a canine companion larger than my mutt’s more petite punctuation.

These experiences, though seemingly unremarkable, are opportunities to be present in the present, to witness what is available when it is offered.

In essence, this is what life really amounts to; this ever-lengthening string of moments weaves our experience into the highly individualized fabric that becomes the sum of our unique lives. Each day is but this series of moments—the wild-fleet gift of being alive.

Paying attention, though simple in concept, can be challenging in practice. We wander through our daily routines, often asleep to what is ever evolving around us. Work is what it always is. Or is it? The people we encounter there are predictable. Or are they?

Each of us is evolving through lives whose effects are felt in varying ways. Take the example of a contagious illness, such as the flu, and the impact its transmission has upon our own plans and routines. Perhaps someone’s car failed to start; another person received news that they will become a grandparent; someone else has decided to quit smoking. Every variable entering the equation of our encounters sets the stage for the “unrepeatable event” to transpire. Each moment is an invitation to wake up to our lives as they occur.

A small calendar on my refrigerator offers the wisdom of 11th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who advises, “Pass not today in vain, / For it will never come again.” What we lose when our awareness lapses is the very thing we stand to gain the most from—what is available to us now. Not what we missed yesterday; not what may or may not happen tomorrow; simply what is transpiring now.

Therein lies the promise of the present moment. Therein lies the uniqueness that defines each of our lives, that which makes it irrevocably ours.

As the author Annie Dillard puts it, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. If we pass the moments in a haze of “no awareness,” the sum of our lives will be, at best, unfocused. If we bring to each moment a sense of “now awareness,” we will create lives of attentive clarity.