Hey, now

Life

I had to check with other parents at the school gates if they, too, were struggling with time and the answer is that I’m not alone. I can’t grab on to the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years because they are grains of sand spilling through my fingers at warp speed, and no sooner do I try to grasp a handful to make sense of it, the tide comes in and deposits more.

Wise texts tell you that the only thing you can rely on is change. We are all precarious on these shifting sand dunes, and no matter where we build our castle, it will get washed away. I don’t know if it’s helpful to understand this or not. We are to Be Here Now, as the delightfully psychedelic 1971 book by Ram Dass advises.

How? At the weekend, I met a stressed-out corporate lawyer who has decided the way to do it is to go to Holland and take some psilocybin. ‘It will get me there quicker,’ he said confidently. ‘I’ve done my research.’ Perhaps it will – and Ram Dass famously tried this route also, simply calling it ‘getting high’ and ultimately concluding that ‘love is the most powerful medicine.’

But love, of course, does not exclusively reside in the blissful escape of a high. It is in the mundane grit of plodding on each day with the life that you have created for yourself. It is in the small extraordinaries that you may witness around you, of noticing at sunset how the leaves of your barely cared for Monstera Deliciosa are reflected in the last rays gracing your hallway wall. It is in unloading the dishwasher for what feels like the tenth time that day, or the limitless embrace you give your child after they have informed you they hate you (albeit followed by they actually love you too).

I am very attracted to the allure of the high, the thing that will fix me, the moment that will make me – call it what you will. Often the present moment repels me; yet equally as often it does not. Stumbling around trying to make sense of motherhood, marriage, domesticity and – time – my brain buzzes constantly, pulled to the nectar of knowledge that might reveal the answer to the question that is existence.

But I already know that the answer is now and here and love; that any such knowledge only confirms what we are all born with: a heart that trusts it will all be taken care of, and a soul that knows its worth in the resplendent multiplicity of the universe.

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