All We Have

The older I grow, the more I realize that I not only believe all the old cliches I once mocked, but also that I am living them. The older you get, the faster time flies. The most important thing is to have your health. What goes around, comes around. 

And the most present of the many old saws I’ve heard is right now is all we’ve got. To speak of these things out loud, especially in the presence of younger people, is to yourself become a cliche. But in moments of clear, undisturbed thought, I see that this saying — right now is all we’ve got — is truer than I have ever wanted to believe. Yesterday and its memories are important; how bleak life would be without visits into the rooms of the past, examining the loved artifacts they contain. And the promise of the future’s “what-if” moments…how exhilarating to ponder how we might diagram an upcoming day, event, epoch.

But neither of things things truly exists. As Kris Kristofferson once mused, “Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow’s out of sight.” 

The quotidian highs and lows tend to numb us. We shamble across fresh fields of hours, plowed and prepared for new plantings, but we kick the clods aside and pay no heed to the richness of the soil into which we might sow new seed. We allow ourselves to be mechanical, to be lulled, to believe that if something truly important presents itself, we will then rouse ourselves and take advantage of the opportunity. There is a brutal contrast in seeing people with Carpe Diem coffee cups on their desks….and dead eyes in their faces. We are fools, all of us, if we simply pass the time waiting for significance. The very moment itself is significant. It is life, and it can never be replicated nor replaced.

I watch my wife go about her morning routine, and I am enthralled by her movements, by her frowns, by her soft mutterings to herself. More and more, I am aware that there will likely come a day when I will be willing to pay any price merely to have a free morning in which I could sit and watch her putter about the house.

We no longer have the past, even though we have memories. We do not have the future, and we are not guaranteed that we will. These are not original observations. But they are true. Today, this moment….these things are all we have. And they matter. They are more important than we want to believe, because such believe requires a halt in our spinning. And to today’s mind, stillness is an awful thing.

Right now is all we have.

~ S.K. Orr