“Accept this moment as it is” in Daydreaming on the Porch

It’s been many years since I read Eckhart Tolle’s revolutionary book The Power of Now. Those words have stayed with me as a powerful memory since the book first came out 24 years ago. But only because they’re easy words to remember and add to one’s collection of wise sayings.

But in practice, it’s much harder to live deeply in the moment, the “Now” that Tolle talks about. However, in recent weeks I’ve become reacquainted with Tolle’s teachings and have rediscovered very powerful, even life-changing kernels of truth and wisdom to apply in my daily life.

In fact, it’s not that hard to take baby steps forward in trying to meaningfully live those annoying or unpleasant moments in life, rather than resisting them. I seem to often look ahead for relief and escape from any situation that causes my impatience and blood pressure levels to rise. It’s totally unnecessary and foolish, even harmful to my health, to let the vexations of life, seemingly induced by other people, control my reactions to those experiences rather than practicing inner calm and turning those moments from highly irritating negative experiences to neutral, if not positive, experiences. After all, they only last for moments, and isn’t that all we’ve really got? The present moment is when we can react to experiences or thoughts by altering our perceptions and approach to them, and redeeming them when otherwise all we want is to get them over with or out of our minds as quickly as possible.

For instance, the other day I was on an annoying street in my city that has five four-way stops in the course of as many blocks. I am always on the busiest of any of those streets. I am convinced it was only because of local politics that this absurd number of stops were placed along this busy street. Someone with connections wanted a no-speeding neighborhood. That’s understandable, but why not just put highly effective speed humps in the street instead?

So with this background in mind, and I’m talking about the historic district of our city, I invariably get behind a tourist who has no idea where he or she is going. So they crawl along at 15 mph from one four-way stop to another. In the past I would get agitated, turn into another street and go around these time-warped tourists, taking a longer route or doing anything to resist the snail’s pace of the car ahead of me. Instead, on Monday when this happened, I let go of the impatience welling up in me and moved along at a glacial pace, looking from side to side at houses, trees, flowers and people walking along the sidewalk. I got to my destination three minutes later, but I was calm and had been living the moments instead of fighting them.

Another example is choosing the wrong line at the grocery store checkout. Often it happens that some shopper ahead of me has to disgorge a handbag or pocket full of discount coupons, each of which has to be scanned by the checkout clerk. Normally, with blood pressure again rising from anger and impatience, I would quickly scan the other checkout lanes and dart over to one of them, only to discover that the shopper in front of me in that new lane had a credit card that didn’t work, or the register had temporarily gone haywire, thus necessitating some manager to come over and try to fix the problem or situation. These are classic moments of resistance, where every primitive instinct summons up a fight or flight response, even in trivial situations such as this. Pathetic, really, but only too human.

Now, if I’m stuck in a line, I relax and take out my iPhone and try to make a dent in one of the huge number of important and valuable articles I have saved to read later.

As a final example, I dashed out the house yesterday to get to the lab to have blood drawn for my upcoming doctor’s visit. I signed in at the desk, took a seat and reached in my pocket to find — nothing. No phone! I’d left it home. Momentary panic ensued. There were at least two people ahead of me and that would take 10-15 minutes at the earliest. What should I do? Run home, get my phone, and come back? Or stay put and slow my racing thoughts about what I was going to do with that 15-minute wait as I began resisting the moments. I resolved to do what formerly was routine in the Dark Ages before the internet. I did some deep beeathing through my mask, and starting thinking about nothing in particular. I felt my muscles relax.

In the next moment an older woman had wheeled her husband, I presume, into the seating area across from me. He was half stooped forward and motionless, but his eyes would open occasionally. It looked like he might have had a stroke, or he could have had Alzheimer’s or dementia, for all I knew, or something else which had incapacitated him.

Now here’s the thing. I’m sitting there looking across the waiting room to the window and the outside world beyond, which happens to be a very busy commercial thoroughfare, partially blocked by the granite sign for the medical complex. The main reason I’m getting the bloodwork is for checking my cholesterol levels (bad cholesterol too high, good cholesterol too low) and the the dreaded PSA test. If I was not going to resist those depressing moments in a blood lab where everyone is my age or older, I realized that rather than get depressed or demoralized looking occasionally at that sad figure of a man just feet from where I sat, thinking, “That could be me some day,” I would instead sneak glances at his faithful, and from all appearances, caring and loving wife who was obviously doing everything she could for him. It reminded me of all the times I had been in that same room with Mom, getting her blood work when she was in her late 80s and 90s and suffering from diabetes and dementia. I thought about how fortunate that man was to have a wife who was evidently taking care of him at home rather than in a nursing home, much as I did with Mom for many years.

When my name was called, my wistful and somewhat melancholy thoughts about the elderly couple vanished. What could have been resistance to those potentially gloomy moments from which nothing but anxiety might have arisen, was instead a brief meditation on love, caring, and devotion, and how fortunate I was to be able provide Mom a comfortable life in her own home when she couldn’t take care of herself. I wasn’t going to think about my future and whether I’d be old AND decrepit like that gentleman in the waiting room. I was learning what the power of now really means. My thoughts were not sad and sullen, and they certainly were not blissful, but they did infuse that short window of time with meaning.

Flowing with the river of life:

https://medium.com/change-your-mind/an-eckhart-quote-that-helps-dissolve-anxiety-accept-this-moment-as-it-is-8880b6336d4

Last updated June 10, 2021