“It is not what you’ll accomplish today that completes you but what you’ll experience that will,” said the spiritual guide Mark Nebo.If that is true, then what is it I’ll experience today that will contribute to my completion? What will come my way today that will make me feel as if I have value? That I am indeed living an ideal life and, as a consequence, leaving a worthwhile legacy?
These questions seem reasonable enough, do they not? Perhaps. But if you look below the surface of the questions, you might feel a similar suspiciousness that there’s a subtle flaw in these questions, too.
“How so?” you ask. Like our accomplishments we wish to achieve, experience itself can be that which we look for in the future, too, even if the future is limited to what we imagine happening this day.
This is often what happens to me. I confuse present moment awareness with the pressure I feel to get ready to step into this day, even as I imagine what will transpire. As a consequence, I hurriedly shower, for example, then dry off just as quickly, get dressed driven almost by a kind of fear I might miss today’s experience. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about conversations I’ll have that day, the things I’ll do, as well as the experiences I’ll have.
I know better than to do this. Because very few things have ever occurred in my life as I’ve imagined them in these early morning hours. The conversations I’ve imagined experiencing are experienced differently than I’ve imagined.
So, while I’ve been hurrying through the shower, the shaving, and the preparing for today’s experiences, I’m missing the experience at hand–the only real experience I could ever have–the experience of now. I miss feeling the drops of water like rain from the shower head above; I miss the warmth of the water as it runs down my cold skin; I miss the relaxing feeling I get as the jets gently massage my skin.
Aren’t these experiences too? Rich one’s indeed? Of course. I have at my fingertips the kind of experience I’ve paid big money to find elsewhere at a local spa or on a vacation in the Bahamas. And all because I’m lost in thoughts about what I’ll experience today, instead of experiencing today as it comes to me…now.
Maybe what Mark Nebo is saying is that you are accomplished already – that is, you are already the very experience you look for throughout the day.
My wiener dog, Oscar, taught me this. I can come home and he’s thrilled to see me. He races through the house like my arrival is as important as that of the King of England. Strangely, however, I can then leave for a mere fifteen minutes and, when I step back in, the parade of his welcome starts all over, as if I had been gone for days again.
How does he do this? I suspect, unlike you and me, Oscar looks not for the next experience but lives into this experience-the experience at hand. Today, try remembering that you are the experience you seek…you are the life you want to live…you are the legacy you wish to leave.
Be aware, not of what is going to happen this morning or this afternoon or even this evening. Instead, be aware of the room around you. Give your attention to what’s happening now, the conversations in the room.
If you’re alone, get out of your conversations in the head for a while. Your mind won’t shut up? Let me tell you how to quiet down the mind. Simply catch yourself thinking, like a mother observing the antics of her child playing on the floor. No judgment of your thoughts. Just the observation of them. Regard them as you would flashing images in a television commercial. Allow the images to come and go. Don’t let them freeze pane in the mind but freely pass away. As they do, give your attention to the emptiness in the room. What is around you is mostly nothing. Be aware of nothing, knowing it is only ever out of nothing that the images you see appear.
So, give your attention to the emptiness…the spaciousness around you. As you type on the keyboard, be aware of the feeling on the tips of your fingers. Notice the spaces between the words on the screen, as often as you are aware of the word. In music, we’re told it is the space between the notes that makes the melodies.
The melodies of your life are created now, not later. The space of nothingness out of which all you create, …accomplish, …is eternal. Know that this way of living brings you into the richest, most meaningful experience of life and living. It brings you into this moment. All there ever is. What Eckhart Tolle calls “the power of NOW!”
It is here you find the mystery of life…the mystery of accomplishment. What happens in this moment IS the life you live…the legacy you leave.
