I’ll open the window.
You, in your warm way,
Welcome in the nighttime hush.
The heavy words
We’ve carried all week
We’ll offer, quiet, to the breeze.
To a hearer, between us
Won’t be much,
But to a seer will be everything.
In this witnessed solitude
Our spirits have a ballroom.
In the silence between us
They slow dance.
Driving to work in a machine —
(For a machine) that gives me power,
And in other ways, takes my power;
A machine tuned and perfected
Over a hundred years;
A machine upon which
Cultures have fallen
And cultures have formed —
A red cardinal, tiny and fragile,
Darted across the road
In front of the machine
That drives me.
Panic pulsed through my heart.
“No! I cannot, atop this other grief,
Mourn the death of such beauty,
Such life, to the machine.”
All in a wingbeat
With a twisting flit,
Violent volitation,
And agile ascension,
The organism evaded the machine,
And I held tight to some far off dream.
Regret and worry, these are two of the greatest plagues of our time, and they only exist because we have this incredible ability to imaginatively inhabit a past or a future.
Regret is a bringing of the past into the present moment. Worry is a bringing of the future into the present moment. As far as we know, no other creature on Earth has the ability to perform such sorcery; at least not to the degree that we do.
Mosquitos have a million babies because they can’t stop before crossing the road and imagine that, if they don’t look both ways, a bus might run them over. If they didn’t have a million babies, the species wouldn’t survive.
Humans don’t need to have a million babies because we can stop before crossing the road and imagine a future scenario in which a bus might run us over. In a sense, we’re able to produce a million lives — what richness! — with our imaginations so that we don’t need to produce a million lives in reality for our species to survive.
It’s an incredible gift, really, to be able to imagine. Yet, I am continually amazed by the number of problems that can be attributed to this gift, this ability to inhabit imaginary moments outside of the present reality.
Most creatures inhabit only the present moment, especially on a conscious level. Humans, though, can imagine past moments and future moments. This makes it impossibly difficult for us to inhabit only the present moment.
When we do not fully inhabit the present, we are bathing in a wealth of time, an abundance of past and future.
The present, though, is always passing, along with all that we have in it, and so it’s a place where little, if any, wealth exists. For this reason, one who inhabits only the present is, in some sense, poor in spirit.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
The richness of past and future has been given to us, as a gift, from God. It’s a way for us to choose something other than his love and his grace.
Why is such a thing a gift? Because unconditional love, true love, cannot be forced upon someone. It’s not love if it’s not freely given and freely accepted. There must be a freedom, held by the receiver, to deny the love. Otherwise, it’s not love. Love is never forced.
Our ability to inhabit an imaginary past or future is one way we can deny God’s love by escaping to a place where his love does not exist.
Of course, this denial makes us miserable because all that is good is part of God. By denying him, we are denying ourselves the source of all goodness.
Yet we are fallen. We suffer from original sin. We are rich in our ability to inhabit a broad span of time through imagination, and it’s nearly impossible for us to give up that richness. Maybe it is impossible.
Possible or not, this ability to inhabit a past or future moment in the present is wealth on a fundamental level.
“The miser whose treasure has been taken from him. It is some of the frozen past which he has lost. Past and future, man’s only riches.”
Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace
The dopaminergic system is what, at a neurological level, drives us. The dopaminergic system is all about anticipating some future reward based on past experiences.
Neuroscientists call dopamine a “universal currency.”
“Dopamine is a universal currency in all mammals, especially humans, for moving us towards goals. How much dopamine is in our system at any one time compared to how much dopamine was in our system a few minutes ago and how much we remember enjoying a particular experience of the past dictates your so-called quality of life and your desire to pursue things.”
Dr Andrew Huberman, Found My Fitness Episode 91
A particular experience of the past drives us to pursue or not pursue something. Pursuit is an anticipation, a seeking of some future thing.
Coffee made me feel good in the past. I am driven to pursue more coffee. Most of coffee’s perceived value exists only because we remember how it made us feel in the past and can imagine feeling that way again in the future.
Your caregiver broke your heart in the past. Now, you will be driven to avoidance or possessiveness due to the past injuries. Much of a relationship’s perceived value (or lack thereof) exists only because we remember how a relational pattern made us feel in the past and can imagine feeling that way again in the future.
The past can cause us very real pain in the present. At the same time, we often give it more power than it deserves.
Even though it causes us pain to do so, we often fixate on painful memories. Why? Because doing so can save our lives, can prevent present and future recurrences.
It’s very useful to be able to imagine that if I step in front of a bus then the bus will hit me.
But we take on this richness in excessive or disordered ways. We fixate on worst case scenarios and rob ourselves of not only the fullness of joy available in the present, but also of any joy we might have had by imagining what could go right, by expecting miracles instead of disasters.
“Always trust. Trust more and more, even to the point of expecting a miracle. Don’t stop halfway or you will set limits to my love. Always count on me, never on yourself.”
Gabrielle Bossis, quoted in Fear is Useless by Conrad Baars
Focusing on the present, or at least the best of the past and future, doesn’t always help. Sometimes our subconscious minds, or maybe our bodies, hold onto regrets or worries without our awareness.
These are like daemons that leech onto the richness that is our memory and our imagination. They are the excesses and disorders that inhabit only the backgrounds of our minds, existing only as unnamed, unidentified dark feelings in the present.
The infant who was left crying in her crib all night, un-soothed by her mother; she doesn’t remember those terrible nights, but many years later, she feels the same terror when her husband doesn’t answer her phone call.
Daemons — subconscious auto-pilot programming — can use our wealth of memory and imagination against us even when we’re not consciously thinking about the past or the future.
While the answer to worry and regret — which are conscious thoughts — is a shift in focus toward the present moment, good memories of the past, and hope for the future; the answer to daemons is a shift in focus toward Christ.
When it comes to daemons, we have a couple unique strengths. We have self-awareness, which allows us to see our behavioral patterns, and we have the freedom to behave in ways contrary to those patterns.
As we become aware of our instinctive patterns, we must use our freedom to break the harmful ones, and to guide our actions toward love.
Still, we will fail. But the more we fail, the more we ache, the more we recognize our own shortcomings, the more we are open to receiving grace. And grace, received through faith and focus on Christ, is the true salvation.
Many problems plague us due to our richness of past and future, of memory and imagination. To experience more joy in the present moment, much of our strength must be spent making ourselves poor in those things.
We will rarely, if ever, be able to live completely, nakedly in the present. But the more we try, the more we practice, the more open we will be to experiencing the fullness of joy in the present moment.
Still, there will be times when we cannot merely inhabit the present. To apologize when we’ve done something wrong, we must acknowledge the past. To prevent the same failure from happening repeatedly, we must anticipate it. But when it’s not absolutely necessary to remember a wrong or anticipate a failure, it is best for us to focus on the good memories, not the bad ones, and to hope for and expect miracles, not disasters.
That, in many ways, is a work of faith. Being present requires faith — faith that things can be different than they were in the past, faith that grace will be given in whatever measure necessary for us to navigate whatever comes. Faith is essential.
Here’s some practical advice. As an act of faith, spend a few minutes each day embodying yourself in the present moment. Go for a walk outside. Using all of your senses, remind yourself of what you notice, what it reminds you of, and what you wonder about it.
Just a few minutes of this each day will strengthen your ability to experience the present more often and more deeply. It will help you take off your fancy garments of past and future.
And when you can’t embody the present — you’re only human after all — remember something good, or imagine a future where everything works out in your favor, where grace favors you and joy is yours.
The world wants you
To be a tool for its use.
Refuse.
Hold your brokenness high.
Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
The pain, don’t trade it for anything.
It is your living.
Do not fit in,
Especially when it costs you money,
Especially, especially, especially
When it costs you you.
Give up every happiness
To stay wild.
Give up everything
To love the one who sets you free.
it it pride?
seizes my heart
clings, desperate
to be held
to be known
to be understood
where is the wine
that falls from the skies
to rain dance
to baptize
is letting go
something you do
or something
you don’t do?
is it death
or is it life?
something in me
longs like a child
who lost his mother
where is home?
A beloved being who disappoints me. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not reply by saying what I have said to myself in his name.
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
On page 79 (later on in Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil), she explains the “renunciation of God.” She doesn’t mean a person renouncing God.
She means this. God creates us so that he is not everything. He renounces being everything.
So, to accept that someone is more than what we imagine them to be, to accept that they are subject, not object, is to renounce being everything — I am not the center of the universe.
Inside of me,
A place where wild things roam,
A flock I must shepherd,
A garden I must tend
Through storms and attacks,
Famine, entropy, growth...growth
— Is it not all growth?
Growth to be hedged and pruned,
Encouraged here, enticed there,
To be nurtured into something beautiful.
And what of these thorny worries?
I've let them grow, expecting fruit,
But they've only become a mess.
I try pruning,
But they only grow back stronger.
Instead, I'll try to crowd them out.
I'll scatter, all among them,
Little seeds of prayer, and of faith
That I'll receive the grace
To handle whatever comes, when it comes.
How do we die to ourselves without suicide?
We live for another. We give up every part of us that says “I.” We forget ourselves with another who forgets their self. We close the eyes that watch out for the self, and open the eyes that watch out for the other. We do everything for the good of that other, and do nothing for the good of the self except in that it is for the good of the other. In doing this, we strip ourselves of the self God gave us as an act of giving, in love, to God.
“Do you love me? Feed my sheep.”
To die without death is to defeat death, to take away its power.
Since the moment it entered my mind, perhaps a year ago now, I’ve been unable or unwilling to let go of the notion that “matter is a phase of consciousness.”
I imagine it like this. Everything created is a flowing river. Sometimes, something uncreated splashes into the river and creates ripples. Those ripples are our material lives. They are us from dust. And when they even back out, we are still there in the flowing river.
Is this notion only delightful? Or is it true?
