The Sanity of Now

A monologue.

So a dirty little secret – everything I do it’s because I want to. 

The forgetting diet, self promises, even a daily reset of who/I am what I want – some part of me wants it. Some part of me wants to weigh 180 lbs.  Some part of me wants to be stretched for money. I am a creature of free will – or, if, not, the illusion is so complete, the matrix is perfect. 

100%. Free. Choice. 

Ok so…

Choice should allow happiness – but what do I base that on? Upon examination, it is a poor/weak correlation, yet, when I feel choice is limited, I obsess over it – feeling trapped, longing to have my way, and when I get it, I do very little. 

Is it because I’ve not been “Trained”/habituated to have free choice with my time?

Trained by parents, school, jobs to give a major part of my schedule over, and so, limit choice?

But this is even deeper, not just how I spend time but choice in what I think/fee/do in tiny moments.

There is a magic in the raw now. Standing at that brink – where then the potential becomes the now, a sacred space. The birth of a moment. The wonder, joy, tragedy as each one becomes real, now alive, and then dies. A raw torrent of sacred potential. 

We stand, at all given moments, in the flow of the sacred blood, life energy of the universe – The River of Stars. There is a wind there, a heartbeat. It animates us as surely as the sun brings energy to this planet. Everything is a part of the now, has a form in the now ticking through the teeth of the cog as links in a bicycle chain turned by the crank. 

Is someone cranking this chain? Or is it as mysteriously alive as we are? “We” being everything – birds, rocks, trees, air, water, elements, mountains, people, deer, rabbits, goats, continental plates.

Things we label “inanimate” are merely so from our narrow, exacting, side-boarded, blindered point of view. Taken from a larger moment, the surface of the earth is a heaving, squirming thing seething with animation. 

What is the length of a moment?

We tend to measure it with a breath. Within this breath are several heartbeats, several blinks – 

Are we eternal moments captured within an awkward blood pistoning machine that someday will stop cranking? 

Or are we a merger of living molecules in amazing collaboration?

The existence of these intricate constructs, self-perpetuating… All the self-perpetuating constructs… is a sacred truth right in front of us. 

The ultimate conspiracy – no one can explain it. 

All our religions are mere conspiracy theories as we do our best to avoid the only truth. The one at that raw torrent on our doorstep. 

When we realize we are suspended in a roaring current of now, it threatens to clear my bones of flesh. Moment by moment tearing molecules away even as new ones appear. 

If we, I , fight it, it hurts, but if I dance with it, let it scour through me, I dance with, make love with, become one with the divine. 

I dissolve – yet  there is enough of me to wield this pen and these words 

All from choice. 

A surplus of nows, from an overly generous universe. So much so that we must “Kill time” when we really are meant to enliven it – to birth it, bring it to life, midwife it – a sacred duty that we profane over and over – losing our way in petty made up preoccupations: our protective insanity. 

My choice. It is all my choice. To avoid – mostly. But now I see. I can, am meant to, choose the now.