SMALL CIRCLE

For me, life is all in the way I look at it. When things are bad, when it seems like things are not going well, life appears big and overwhelming. It seems as if some tall mountain is looming close, casting a shadow over me looking like it might fall, might crush me beneath tons of rock and soil. But, when things are going fine there is flat land in front of me and I am the tallest object in sight. My perspective is one of looking down at the horizon lying harmlessly flat, stretched in submission—like a simple line drawn with a pencil merely to separate earth and sky.

Looking forward at life it can seem overwhelming, and looking at "now" might seem invisible—impossible to see for lack of perspective. These days I hear people, all the time, shouting from roof tops, "live in the now!" I’ve found myself doing it myself. It’s easy to become part of a like-minded group. All of us, feel safe in repeating what we hear others say—it gives us a sense of community. We feel comfortable when we hear our own voice as part of a group shouting the familiar to one another. It’s the same feeling when we’re sitting in the stands on the same side of a stadium rooting for our team with rows of like-minded fans. No wonder we’re sometimes called sheep.

People especially like to quote what Buddha had to say about living in the present. But I challenge this whole notion of living in the present! Tell me, When is "now"? "Now" is "then". As soon as we say the word "now" or even think it, it’s in the past—the thought is gone. So why bother to try to live in the present at all? I don’t have to tell myself to live—it just happens all on its own without even having to think about it.

Basically, I don’t have to worry about time at all. Time is something we humans have created for our own convenience—perhaps to create some order. But it seems like we have abused what began as an innocent need. It’s as if, especially in the modern world, we feel a need to "fill up our time" as in "fill up our day." And that, for me anyway, leads to craziness!

So I try to remember that time really doesn’t exist—it’s invisible. It’s unreal. It’s something made up. I tend to think that I’ve done a lot of things in this lifetime, traveled to a lot of places—in essence, filled up much of my allotted time. Then I had the idea to draw my life as a circle—from the beginning to where I am now—and I saw just how small a circle I’d drawn.