There is an interesting paradox that starts to show itself when you really begin living in the moment. At first it feels wonderful. You’re closer to life. You’re actually there for things instead of constantly thinking about them. But then you begin to notice how transitory everything is. You have a beautiful dinner with people you love, you go to a concert, you have one of those nights where everything feels luminous and you don’t want it to end. And then it ends. You’re driving home. The next morning comes. Something else is happening. You knew intellectually that life was impermanent, but living it is different. When you actually start becoming present, you feel the transiency of life much more intimately because you are finally there enough to notice it.
The mind immediately wants to solve this. What is the point of being completely in the moment if the moment disappears? Shouldn’t I remember it? What about planning for the future? If I’m really present, how do I have goals? But either you’re with the moment or you’re not. If you’re sitting around nostalgically recreating something that happened yesterday, you’re not actually back there. Your memory isn’t the event. It’s your mind thinking about the event, rearranging it, interpreting it, creating a version of it. Meanwhile, this moment is happening and you’re missing it. The only place where life exists is in the moment. The only place where love exists is in the moment. It is here for you now, in the living presence of whatever possibility is actually in front of you.
Memory Is Different From Recapitulation
That doesn’t mean there is no value in looking back. There is a huge difference between nostalgia and recapitulation. Recapitulation is almost like going to the top of a mountain and surveying the landscape. You can see things from up there that you couldn’t see when you were down inside of them. You have changed. Your awareness has grown. You can return to something that happened a year ago or five years ago and suddenly comprehend things that were completely invisible to you when you were living through them. You’re bringing the awareness you have now to something you experienced then, and in doing that you can gather something back to yourself. That is very different from sitting around wishing you could have yesterday again.
Planning is no different. You can plan a trip completely in the present. You look at the calendar that is sitting in front of you. You feel what timing seems right. You look at flights. You decide where you want to land and where you might stay. You bring everything you have right now to those decisions. What you don’t have to do is project yourself into some imaginary future and decide who you will be then, what you’ll feel then, or what you’ll want then. You don’t know. You know who you are now. So you make the best decision you can from the awareness you have, and when the future becomes the present, you meet it again. Maybe you take the trip. Maybe something changes and you don’t. Maybe you arrive and decide the hotel was a terrible idea and go somewhere else. Everything remains open to the moment.
I learned a great deal about this simply by living this way. Years ago I took a group of students to Tahoe, and almost nothing went according to plan. The rental car turned out to be unusable. The rental offices were closing. I left the students sitting on a lawn at Berkeley while I took an Uber around trying to find another car, eventually going all the way to the airport and walking down the line of rental counters until somebody finally said yes. We packed ourselves into the car and arrived around midnight instead of late afternoon. Then there was a problem with the house and we had to leave. I found another place at the last minute, and it turned out to be more beautiful than the first one. The students eventually told me that watching all of this unfold became one of the teachings of the trip. Nothing had gone according to plan, and nothing was wrong. We just kept moving with what life was actually giving us.
The Ego Wants Life to Hold Still
This becomes particularly interesting when something wonderful happens. The ego gets what it wants and then immediately becomes upset when it’s gone. Hey! I loved that. I don’t want it to end! There can be something very sweet about that feeling, even poignant, which makes it harder to recognize. But underneath it can also be the ego’s insistence that something beautiful should have remained beautiful in exactly the form in which it appeared. Life doesn’t work that way. Summer becomes fall. The concert ends. Dinner ends. The people leave. You drive home. But the car ride home may contain an entirely different beauty if you aren’t busy insisting that the previous experience should still be happening.
This is where practice becomes very real. You begin catching the ego in small moments. That is actually the best place to learn because the stakes are low. You can become curious about it. Oh, look at that. I got what I wanted, loved it, and now I’m upset because it ended. That’s interesting. There will be much bigger moments when life does something you absolutely did not want, and if you have never learned fluidity in the small ones, you will not suddenly possess it when everything gets difficult. Before we come to the path, most of us are completely unprepared for this because we have been trained to assess everything according to our conditioning: good, bad, success, failure, wanted, unwanted, should have happened, shouldn’t have happened. We’re analyzing while life is moving. We’re replaying what somebody said, wondering how we came across, figuring out what we should have done differently. The moment is already somewhere else.
One of my students described this beautifully as “lagging in real life.” That’s exactly what happens. Your mind is ten seconds, ten minutes, ten years behind what is actually occurring. He discovered it while recording a podcast. Instead of listening, he was keeping track of what had just been said and preparing what he would say next. But while he was preparing his response to something from ten seconds ago, the conversation had moved on. Sometimes the question he was preparing to ask was already being answered. Once he stopped doing that and simply stayed with the person speaking, something changed. He could listen. He could respond. He could stay with what his podcast partner was saying without rummaging through his mind for the next thing to say. The conversation began to flow because he was finally where the conversation was.
Fluidity Is a Form of Strength
This doesn’t mean having no direction in life. Goals can be wonderful. It’s fun to have a goal. The trick is learning to have goals without becoming imprisoned by them. My goal on that Tahoe day was very simple: get to Tahoe. Apparently life had chosen a spectacularly circuitous route. Fine. We still got there. The problem begins when the goal becomes an expectation and we start manipulating life toward that expectation, believing happiness depends upon getting the result we imagined. Then every change becomes an affront. Every delay becomes a problem. Every unexpected turn becomes evidence that something has gone wrong.
For me there has really only been one enduring goal, which is to live in truth. Life has rallied around that in ways I never could have planned. That doesn’t mean I sit in a room doing nothing because I’m so surrendered to life that nothing matters. This human incarnation is extraordinary. We have a body. We have intelligence. We can travel, work, create, love, take risks, meditate, dance, build things, screw things up and learn. Why waste that? The body is a vehicle. Transcending identification with it doesn’t mean refusing to use it. I’m not controlled by my car either, but if I have one, I’m going to drive it.
Surrender is much more alive than passivity. It means you stop insisting that existence conform itself to your agenda. You bring your totality to what is here, and then when life moves, you move. You can make plans. You can build a career. You can take a trip. You can create a podcast without knowing what the heck you’re doing and discover, in the process, exactly what you need to learn. You can take enormous risks out of a mixture of courage, innocence and complete cluelessness. I’ve done plenty of that. Sometimes that is how life teaches us. We step into something bigger than our present ability and discover ourselves there.
The deeper this goes, the less solid everything becomes. We ask questions from solidity and want solid answers: What should I do? What will happen? Who will I be? How do I make sure this lasts? But life keeps moving. The path teaches you how to move with it. Eventually even surrender stops feeling like something you are practicing. You trust life because you have discovered that you are not separate from it. You stop trying to superimpose your limited ideas onto an intelligence vastly larger than your own. And there is something tremendously buoyant about living that way. You can cherish what is here without needing to possess it. You can love the moment completely and still let it go to move seamlessly into the next.