Minding Our Moments

I do a lot of reading about the Buddhist philosophy, the heart of which is the concept of mindfulness. It’s all about paying attention to what’s going on right this minute. This is hard from me since I tend to romanticize the past, which I remember as perfect (it wasn’t) or stressing out over the future, which seems scary (it probably won’t be).

This is not a new concept of course, though it is back in fashion with a vengeance. Way back in 1970, a guy named Richard Alpert, or Baba Ram Das, as he preferred to be called, wrote a book called Be Here Now. He was high on LSD when he wrote it, but the title and the idea had staying power.

I have a complete shelf filled with books on this and many other Buddhist teachings; but, as one of those teachings famously observes, “a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” Similarly, reading about living in the moment is not actually doing it; it’s just reading about it.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the modern day mindfulness guru, keeps pointing out that this moment is the only moment we have, and, if we don’t live it, it’s gone. Then one day we wake up and find that we are out of moments.

Believe it or not, I just got that. I was talking to my oldest friend, who was telling me a story about a father and daughter who had not spoken for 15 years. The daughter wasn’t ready to break the silence … yet. She may never be. "So sad,” my friend said. “She’ll never get those years back. They’re gone. Wasted. Life not lived.”

After all those years of reading, all those books, all those words — just like that, I understood. Fifteen years doesn’t sound like a big number; 473,040,000 does. That’s how many moments of her life that girl lost. How many have I not lived, ignored, wasted? How many do I have left? I don’t know. Nobody knows.

I guess that’s the point.