Here and now is not later; it is not tomorrow when I get up. Much less is it next Monday. Here and now is this instant, covered with normalities, with nothing mystical or poetic, but rather overwhelmingly normal. Here and now has no angel chants as background music, no cherry blossoms under our nose begging to be sniffed; no written instruction from the oldest and most exciting esoteric school of all time born on the peaks of Tibet, indicating that “here and now” is here and now. No, nothing like that.
So you are reading this, you look up and see the same thing you saw yesterday and will see tomorrow. Hearing the same old noises, the same old inner dissatisfaction and outer discomfort and exactly that is here and now. There is no other. But this colorless, tasteless, odorless moment is the moment of creation, it is the one with the power, the potential.
We spend our lives with mind, feelings, expectations and our whole soul placed elsewhere. In the past with bittersweet longing. In the future, with fear and desire. Permanently in another place and in another time and always without realizing it, wandering without center, believing that we live but we do not really live: that which we call living, we spend it remembering, hoping or imagining. Nothing more…
And then death catches us without having lived (the incessant struggle against the vicissitudes of everyday life cannot be called living either) without having been, without having been, and then I ask myself and I ask you: What if this were the only opportunity?
If this were the only opportunity, I would do an exercise that I learned once and that has helped me a lot to train my wandering mind to focus on the here and now. This exercise consists of becoming aware of my own breath while simultaneously becoming aware of each and every sound around me. It’s simple, two or three seconds and that’s it. One is already here and now.