The Reality Of The Moment

Early morning fog rises over an Atlanta neighborhood.

My wife and I sat out on the deck this morning over coffee, watching the sunrise through the Atlanta fog. She stared at the two groves of very rare, one year-old bamboo that we have lining our property and exclaimed, “I wish that I could see what this is going to look like in three years.” At that point our four year-old made his presence on the deck, and I began to think about my wife’s statement.

Would you be willing to leap ahead into the future, fast forward your life to get to an expected point? Can I just jump ahead a few years to when my son is already in school, or to the point when our back yard Japanese garden has taken full-form? I think that the answer is, no. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. The future is a myth, a construct of our minds, a dream, mist, nothing more.

There is no future, and for that matter there’s no past either. Neither exists. Doubt me? Then show them to me. The only thing that exists is right here, right now. I can close my eyes and feel it, it smells, it’s cold, it tastes bitter, it’s now. Nothing else exists outside of your mind. Don’t be fooled by this simple mind trick. Enjoy and live what you have here and now because in the flash of lightning it’s going to be gone and will never exist again.