This moment still has a lot to give
How I learned that even the most amazing vision of tomorrow is robbing us of today
“I can’t wait for tomorrow. Can’t wait to get out of here, drive home, and hug my kids!”
It was a moment of absolute ecstasy. I was bursting with joy, exploding with love, overflowing with delicious anticipation.
I spent the last five days alone, in a completely dark room, without ever seeing a single ray of light, not talking with anyone. Five days doesn’t sound like much, but it could have been a year for all I knew. Darkness changes many things, amongst them the perception of time.
I was sitting there on my last day of darkness and was suddenly overcome with intense joy.
“I will get out of here tomorrow, drive to my kids, hug them, dance silly dances with them, scream, play, wrestle, shower them with love, and bathe in theirs!”
I could see in front of my inner eye how wonderful our reunion would be, and kept imagining how much fun we’d have. It was exhilarating. I wanted to just keep daydreaming about tomorrow all day long, fill myself to the brim with joyful anticipation… until a sobering realization took hold:
Indulging in this fantasy would come at a high price: the present moment.
And the present moment is all I got.
The truth was that it wasn’t tomorrow yet. It wasn’t time to go out into the light, to drive to my kids and dance silly dances. It was my last day in darkness, and I still had the whole day in front of me.
A lot can happen in a day.
A lot can happen in any given moment.
But it won’t, if you’re not there for it.
Choosing to throw away the day, to indulge in the idea of tomorrow, seemed foolish and risky.
I would lose any experience that might still wait for me here, in the darkness, today.
I would also lose the freshness of tomorrow, entering it without expectations and preconceived notions.
Being excited about tomorrow is awesome, deciding to sacrifice today in order to live in our imagination isn’t.
There were still a lot of lessons that I had to go through and learn that day in darkness. And I’m grateful I did.
The next morning, before walking into the light, I was bursting with the same energy and excitement as I had imagined the day before. One of the members of the retreat walked me out of the house. The cold, fresh air hit me. I sat down on a chair. And then the moment came. It was time to take off my mask.
This was very different from how I had imagined it. I didn’t feel like jumping up and doing a happy dance. I felt almost mentally frozen, overwhelmed.
I went into a deep trance, was barely able to move. I found myself in a slow motion world of intensity. Snow covered everything, a thick, heavy fog enveloped the wild forest trees.
Never did reality feel so much like a dream.
For hours I sat there, paralyzed, barely breathing.
Everything was so intense, every sound, every color, every movement.
Eventually, after hours of sitting in the cold, being snowed upon, I realized that I didn’t feel my legs anymore. Otherwise I’d probably have sat there until nightfall. I had to stand up, get back into the house.
A few heedful steps from the terrace back into the warm shelter of the house. This would be a very challenging day for me.
While still in the dark, I’ve had all these ideas, visions of what today would look like, where I would go, what I would do—and now had to reconcile what I had imagined with this very different reality.
I took a couple of hours to mentally and emotionally adjust before getting into my car and driving to my children.
But let me tell you: there was no dancing. No wrestling. No shouting. At least not that day. I embraced my kids, and told them that daddy was feeling very raw. “You need to be gentle with me today.” I needed more time for myself. I ended up sitting outside in the garden, trying to get a grip on reality and to readjust back to life.
I ended up struggling unnecessarily. The sharp contrast between my delicious anticipation, versus how reality actually played out was too much. Parts of my mind were still holding on to its expectations.
Isn’t that the source of most of my struggles?
Ideas, thoughts, and expectations.
A willingness to throw away the present moment, an eagerness to reach for tomorrow and already divide up its fruits in my imagination.
I have to keep reminding myself to stay here in the present moment, where life truly unfolds.
To be open to it, no matter what it holds, humble and loving, curious and engaged, especially when it appears like it ain’t worth much, when it seems like there is nothing going on worth noticing, that’s when life often delivers its greatest goods to us.
No matter what your mind thinks, this moment still has a lot to give.
Make sure to be there for it.