February 12
Drink from this moment, for it is your life. Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet come — what you surely possess is the now alone.
Rubaiyat (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Drink from this moment, for it is your life. Yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet come — what you surely possess is the now alone.
A Friday evening and a Sunday evening can look almost exactly alike. The same lamp, the same sofa, perhaps even the same book. And yet they feel different. On Friday the weekend still lies ahead of you; on Sunday, Monday already does.
So the hour in which you sit never entirely belongs to itself. Part of its lightness comes from something that hasn't even happened yet, and so does part of its heaviness. When you try to be only here, you soon notice how much expectation this here contains. The past is in it too: a quiet evening after a strenuous week is not the same as one after days when hardly anything happened.
That doesn't make the present any less real. It's just that perhaps you don't possess it like an object you could lift out of its surroundings and hold in your hand. It has edges, and they reach further than the moment.
On Sunday you sometimes manage to stay with the book all the same. Monday isn't forgotten then. It is only waiting, without yet reading along.
