Becoming Someone New, Moment by Moment
In one of my classes this week, I shared this quote from Lama Surya Das:
“With every breath, the old moment is lost; a new moment arrives. We exhale and we let go of the old moment. It is lost to us. In doing so, we let go of the person we used to be. We inhale and breathe in the moment that is becoming. In doing so, we welcome the person we are becoming. We repeat the process. This is meditation. This is renewal. This is life.”
This suggests that life happens only in the present moment, one moment at a time. If we think about it, where else could it happen?
But because we are able to remember things from the past and to think about the future, we tend to think of our lives as happening in the past, present, and future. But the past is over and the future isn’t here yet – it doesn’t exist except as a concept. There really is only the present moment in which our life exists. However, in our lived experience, these single moments blend into the next and reach back to the past, so we perceive our lives in much larger portions – an hour, a day, a decade, a lifetime.
In those hours, days, and decades we experience a lot of suffering, sadness, fear, and grief. Also joy, love, delight, and peace.
How to tip the balance toward greater peace and less suffering?
Writer and teacher Eckhart Tolle (among many others) says:
“How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment.”
If we want internal peace, it’s not so much about twisting our days and our lives around to avoid the negative stuff and have only the positive parts of life. We can try, but we can’t control life – we can’t will ourselves to not age or get sick or die, for example. In our very trying to change reality, we suffer because we can’t succeed at this in any significant way. I love how Pema Chodron puts it when she implores us to stop fighting with reality and instead cooperate with it - to stop arguing with the inarguables. Therein lies real peace, and freedom from our incessant attempts to change reality to better suit our preferences. Or to pretend our reality is other than how it is.
It's much easier for me to cooperate with realities I don’t like or want if I take them in moment-sized bites. In this moment, right here – not the next one, not the last next one – it’s much easier to come to terms with reality as it presents itself. One breath, one fresh new moment. If we can put down our fight with reality for each single moment … Peace!
As Surya Das adds, not just peace but renewal; we actually become someone new in every new moment. Imagine! So much possibility.
In what ways do you experience yourself as becoming someone new?
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