(The Nationalist, c. December 2001)
Once, when I lived in New Zealand, I was travelling on a suburban train towards the capital, Wellington. It stopped at a station and some graffiti caught my eye. On a free-standing wall someone had sprayed, ‘Get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work…’ and so on and on. It went round and round the wall so that you could keep reading it forever. It expressed well the sense of being on a treadmill that burdens many people.
There are people who spend the week waiting for the week-end, the year waiting for the holidays, working life waiting for retirement – and then what? Retirement waiting for death? What a waste! Sometimes we go through life with one eye on the past, another on the future and have none left for the present. If we do that we turn life into a series of missed opportunities, we never really live in it, we just pass through it on our way to somewhere else. We miss out on what has been called “the sacrament of the present moment”. Each day is a new page of the Gospel that God writes specially for us.
The story is told of a disciple who went to the Zen master and asked, ‘What is the secret of life?’ The master, who happened at the time to be eating an apple, said, ‘The secret of life is eating an apple.’ If he had been digging the garden, he would have said, ‘Digging the garden.’ Or lighting your pipe, etc. One benefit of living in the present is that relationships become more significant than functions; it allows us to become human beings instead of mere functionaries. ‘The real challenge is not to discover new lands but to see the present land with new eyes,’ said the French writer Marcel Proust. Living in the present unburdens us so that we can do that.
It is the good use of the present that makes the future worth hoping for. It is a kind of practice run for living in eternity. To live in the present is the nearest we can get to living in the presence – of God. It is to live more simply, more completely, more humanly, in a less stressful manner. Eternity is not time without end; it is outside of time, an enduring present – with God.
‘Yesterday’s history;
tomorrow’s a mystery;
today is a gift,
and that’s why we call it
– the present’.
(Andrea Kearns)