Like Otters, Slippery From The Water

On the drive into work this morning I thought about the difficulties of staying inside the moment. According to Google, that fountain of semi-infinite knowledge, I live 11 miles from the office. On an average day, using Lawrence Expressway, it's about a 20 minute commute. You would think that pulling yourself into the moment and staying relatively focused for twenty minutes, while engaged in the fairly complex mechanical task of driving, would be fairly simple. But, as I drove up the expressway, I repeatedly watched my thoughts simply take off.

I would be driving down the road and suddenly solid thoughts would turn fluid and flow across the landscape of my imagination. I came to the conclusion tha t thoughts

were slippery things. Just when you think you have them in your grasp, they will suddenly twist and turn and get away from you. By consciously observing my thoughts I became aware of them as they escaped the present moment.

When I saw the thought had dashed away, I would simply say "Gone!", then try and consider the thought and see what insight I could gain. I would try to find that point where I lost them, where they left the moment. I would look at why they left the moment. I would look at what took them down the path that led them to wherever they were going. I would let the thoughts that escaped go and I would pull back into the current moment.

In that twenty minute drive it would not be an exaggeration to say that those slippery thoughts of mine took off in different directions at least twenty times. They did it in some pretty amusing ways. I would have a trigger thought, somewhere in the present moment, and it would unleash an entire cascade of thoughts that went flowing out of the moment. Sometimes they were slow and subtle, a quiet stream meandering through a mountain meadow. Other times they were a sudden raging torrent that went tumbling over the rocks, all wild coursing and dancing spray. Like otters, slippery from the water, they would pause and then with a flash, be gone.

The moment, this moment, is a challenging place to stay in, even though it is the place where we naturally reside. Our restless imaginations are filled with slippery moments that pause and are gone.

A Dreaming Waltz

I wandered through most of the day today thinking about the most simple of challenges. The challenge of "being here, now". Far to often I find something that pulls me out of the moment - pulls me into the past, pulls me into the future, pulls me physically into a different space. Then I focus and pull myself back into the here and now...and the dance continues. Sometimes it is a stately and elegant waltz. Other times it is a mad jig danced to a furious fiddle. Once in a great while it is both at the same time. It seems like the only time I am in the here and now is when I'm sleeping - and then, often enough, I am dreaming as well.
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Some Thoughts on Now

One of the areas I continually struggle with is what I call “the challenge of now”. Over the years I’ve trained myself to multitask. I would like to think I was pretty good at it, but that is probably an illusion. In the last year or two (2010 and 2011), I’ve been making a conscious effort to focus on trying to single-task, trying to do one thing at a time, trying to focus on being in the moment and doing what is in that moment. It is a fairly difficult thing to do.

My mind takes to run away from me, take off in other directions, easily distracted by the thoughts of other things and other days. This captures us between the real and the unreal. The past is done, there is nothing that can be done about it, nothing that be undone in it – and it is no longer real.

The past is the echo of the real.

The past is the echo of now.

The future is also unreal. The future is unrealized potential. The future does not become real until that moment when it becomes the now.

That is a tough thing to get the brain around. Yes, the actions we choose in the now influence the availability of choices in the future, but that link is mostly unreal as well. There is rarelly anything that prevents us from making radically different choices, from taking actions that are a radical departure from the current course we’ve set ourselves on.

Realizing that life is in the moment, pulling our thoughts back into the here and the now, is always an ongoing challenge for me.