HERE AND NOW

“The aim of life is to be fully born,
though its tragedy is that most of us
die before we are thus born.
To live is to born every minute.”
ERICH FROMM

Our lives unfold in an infinite succession of moments. Those that have gone by and live in our memories make up our past. Those that have still to come, what we imagine, is what we think will be our future. But what is real, and the only true thing that is always with us is the present, now, or, better still, our awareness of our own existence in the brief instant that we can’t even quantify because it passes as soon as it is noticed.

The present is manifested in the here and now. More than an instant and a place, it is presence becoming conscious of itself; it reveals itself in our awareness of our own being; in our ability to realise we are Presence, Consciousness. It is important to be aware of ourselves and of the life that unfolds from the centre of ourselves at every moment. Because we are not our names, which are simply labels; neither are we our bodies, which change constantly; nor are we our emotions or the way we feel, which mutate and fluctuate with the circumstances and how we deal with them internally; nor are we the ideas we form about ourselves, others or life, which are as fickle as a feather in the wind; and nor, of course, are we our professions (how often do we define ourselves as a doctor, a builder, a teacher… ?). We are simply Presence, Consciousness, Being. The presence that realises that a person thinks, feels, and lives, is. That pure, simple thing; bare, essential; so obvious we end up not even noticing it, forgetting about it. But its value, though it goes unnoticed, is infinite, because it is life itself. Without Presence there would be no Consciousness, no Life.

Why do we not just allow ourselves to be? Why do we not connect to the flow of life here and now and forget our future pre-occupations and memories of the past that so often weigh on us; and focus on the world that unfolds from our essential centre. Because the past and future are the seat of our illnesses: against the pain of the memories of our past life and the anguish of what is to come, we have the present, the fleeting yet eternal present moment, in which we can regain our health, our awareness, our life. From it, we can even give our past a different meaning and create a future devoid of anguish and full of hope. Because life and all its possibilities are concentrated in all their potential in the present, in the here and now, and we can create it from the centre, where “I Am”.

What can we do, then? Give ourselves up to the present. Build our lives by giving ourselves utterly to what we have to experience, here and now. Feel, think and act from our essential centre. Because it is here that we are indefinitely renewed, moment by moment, and from here we can connect to our own selves, to life, and continue on the journey that opens up to us at each moment.

We are human beings with a consciousness. We are born women and men, but we become human as we enlarge and deepen our own awareness. We aren’t machines. Between every stimulus we receive and how we respond to it is a space; a space of consciousness. It is in that space, here and now, that our power to transform and our freedom to decide lie. In the decisions we make in awareness, with a positive attitude, giving of ourselves, is where our growth, happiness and the Good Life lie.

The attitudes we choose in the awareness of the present create emotions and thoughts. Our emotions and thoughts are translated into acts. The acts we repeat from there become habits. Our habits determine our characters. It is our characters that define the meaning of our lives and the meaning we give them and will have given them when we leave this world, in our final moment. The sign of our lives is built, then, through the simple fact of living in the here and now, and in making choices in the awareness of each moment.

Álex Rovira