What happens when we do not recognize the equal importance of each moment?
Life is lived breath by breath, each breath no more and no less vital than another. This is one of those blindingly obvious truths. Obvious once you pay attention to it but when you don’t, you are completely blind to it.
It’s not as if you could take one almighty breath and be done with breathing for the rest of your life. That’s not how life flows within and through you. You have to keep taking another breath and another and another.
This is equally true about our life experiences. They happen not as the big, dramatic crises, failures, disappointments, tragedies or triumphs that we measure and review our lives by but as moment to moment events.
Photo from PxHere
And because we mostly ignore the moments in between these big, dramatic events, we do not see how each one is just as vital, just as pivotal, just as meaningful, just as impactful as every other. In other words, we are never present and open to the fullness of each moment.
What happens when we do not recognize the equal importance of each moment?
We don’t course correct in a timely and conscious way. This leaves us always ‘catching up’, reacting rather than responding to things and wondering how and why they happened to us.
We miss the significance of each moment and all the potential within it.
We fail to take timely and appropriate action. We risk being late in our response and end up reacting to things that have gotten so bad that recovery is hard. Not impossible but often much harder than they might have been.
The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.
Jon Kabat-Zin
Photo from PxHere
A plane in flight has a departure point and a destination. Its pilot knows the route – where it needs to go and from where. But it is not as if the pilot can just set the plane to fly without having to course correct throughout the flight in response to atmospheric and other conditions both outside and within the aircraft. The more vigilant he is, the less extreme his course corrections need to be and the more timely they are. His presence and responsiveness to changes in air conditions is immediate, accurate and ‘just enough’ or optimal.
Imagine if we were equally present and responsive to changes that are taking place from one moment to another. Imagine if we responded accurately and immediately and that our response was always ‘just enough’, neither too much nor too little, neither fearful nor over-confident, neither disinterested nor prying, neither forceful nor limp…
That’s what we stand to gain by recognizing the equal importance of every moment and being in a state of spontaneous responsiveness which is the natural, effortless and enlightened way of Love.
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