The Now

My “season of listening” continues.

As I’ve mentioned previously, one writer whose words I’m using as a guide throughout this season is Eckhart Tolle, who in his book Stillness Speaks, writes the following.

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment, ever? Is life ever not “this moment”?

This one moment – Now – is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now.

Since there is no escape from the Now, why not welcome it, become friendly with it?

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When you make friends with the present moment, you feel at home no matter where you are. When you don’t feel at home in the Now, no matter where you go, you will carry unease with you.

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The present moment is as it is. Always. Can you let it be?

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The division of life into past, present, and future is mind-made and ultimately illusory. Past and future are thought forms, mental abstractions. The past can only be remembered Now. What you remember is an event that took place in the Now, and you remember it Now. The future, when it comes, is the Now. So the only thing that is real, the only thing there ever is is the Now.

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To have your attention in the Now is not a denial of what is needed in your life. It is recognizing what is primary. Then you can deal with what is secondary with great ease. It is not saying, “I’m not dealing with things anymore because there is only the Now.” No. Find what is primary first, and make the Now into your friend, not your enemy. Acknowledge it, honor it. When the Now is the foundation and primary focus of your life, then your life unfolds with ease.

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Putting away the dishes, drawing up a business strategy, planning a trip – what is more important: the doing or the result that you want to achieve through the doing? This moment or some future moment?

Do you treat this moment as if it were an obstacle to be overcome? Do you feel you have a future moment to get to that is more important?

Almost everyone lives like this most of the time. Since the future never arrives, except as the present, it is a dysfunctional way to live. It generates a constant undercurrent of unease, tension, and discontent. It does not honor life, which is Now and never not Now.

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Feel the aliveness within your body. That anchors you in the Now.

– Eckhart Tolle
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks
Hodder & Stoughton, 2003
pp. 39-42

Related Off-site Links:
Honoring the Present Moment – Eckhart Tolle (via YouTube, November 9, 2023).
The Power of the Present Moment and Conscious Living – Eckhart Tolle (via YouTube, January 16, 2024).
Transform Through Presence: a Review of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now – Vivien Tai (Medium, July 17, 2023).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Season of Listening
• Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
• Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond the Thinking Mind
• To Be Still
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• Time to Go Inwards
• A Prayer of Anchoring
• Today I Will Be Still
• Cultivating Stillness
• Inner Peace
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Stepping Out of Time and Resting Your Mind
• Active Waiting: A Radical Attitude Toward Life
• Threshold Musings
• To Dream, to Feel, to Listen
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source is Within You
• Forever Oneness
• In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
• As the Last Walls Dissolve . . . Everything is Possible

Image 1: Wood Lake Nature Center, Richfield, MN – Michael J. Bayly (4/22/24).
Image 2: Saaxiib Qurux Badan (“Beautiful Friend”), Minneapolis, MN – Michael J. Bayly (4/18/24).