There is no other but the now. Everything else is constructed.
The now is a waiting room. A penitentiary before the thing you want begins, until you are deserving. The horizon remains always the horizon, receding as you approach. In endeavoring to reach it, you miss the thing that is real and viewable only in rewind: that you were always endeavoring, and never reaching.
But look how far you’ve come, but look how many nows you spent reaching for something you had all along: the now.
The now is the past, remembered. You leave the moment, spend nows remembering past lives. Imperfect replay. The dunes look different when you are looking back at them. But maybe it was always this way? Or this was the construction you chose.
Sometimes you sit silently and feel the strange ache of existence and the nows bygone.
Sometimes you hold a friend’s gaze a little longer, make up names and stories for strangers who sit across from you on the train.
What verisimilitude in the universe of nows led to this stranger sitting on this train in this seat at this time across from this you?
The now is the future, imagined. You build hypothetical nows, like cloud castles in the sky. You keep yourself elsewhere because elsewhere is whatever you want it to be.
In the now, you have dominion but no control.
You are hurtling through the now searching for the horizon to steady yourself. To be in the now is to be unarmored.
You must launch yourself on every wave.
In not doing so, you risk withholding your life from itself for all it could have been, is, and could be. Wherever you are, be there totally, unrepeatably, remarkably. Miss it, and you miss everything.
“Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the now.”
— Eckhart Tolle
This is it.
This is always it.
You’re already here.
The now is yours. This radical, unscripted flicker.