“I am as all mortals are, unable to be patient.” — Pablo Neruda

If 2020 has taught me anything – and it has taught me a lot – it is the importance of staying in the present.  I am an almost notoriously impatient person. It is my great challenge to learn and practice patience.

This is a wrought and fearful time, and I get and see messages every day from people who can’t forget the past and greatly fear the future.

I think the very essence of spirituality for me is learning to stay in the present.

I feel the past – nostalgia, and regret – is a trip and the future is simply not knowable. It rarely happens in the way we predict or expect. We are perhaps the earth’s most arrogant species, we think we can know what comes.

Like every person, every year is individual, it makes its own mark, it goes its own way. The future is just not knowable for me.

No two years are ever the same, just as no two people are ever the same.

It is awfully difficult to wait, and yet nothing less than patience can help me see the whole of it, rather than just one small part that is a day.

I used to think that me and what happens to me is important.

When I stop and think, I am reminded that I am smaller than a microbe in our universe, a speck in the spectrum of life, no matter how I delude myself.

I am persuaded as I grow up and older that the mystery of life is incomprehensible, and what can be understood often comes in a language so slow and shallow that few of us hang around long enough to hear it or listen to it.

That takes great patience and acceptance, the foes of the distracting world. When the light shines through – this is rare – it seems a miracle.

Pablo Neruda wrote that patience is a gift that waits beneath our very human agitation and fear. But only through the extraordinarily difficult effort of staying present – of being patient –  will the meaning of my life and of the life around me be revealed to me.

I see all around me a world of frantic and frightened people, jumping from fear to fear, story to story, emotion to emotion, their emotions roller-coasting around day after day.

We run around, angry and drowning in worry, in search of love, peace or the things we believe or are taught to want, forgetting that where we looked and listened long ago is finally letting some light or sprouting its truth.

As Neruda wrote, it takes a very long time for joy to split its human bark.

This is a testing time for me, for all of us. That means it’s a learning time as well.

An ancient mystic wrote in the Kabbalah that it is only when we can outwait the darkness will the veil of experience recede like an ocean tide and reveal what has survived and lives beneath it.

I work hard to keep the future out of my head and let go of the past. More and more, I succeed. It will show itself to me when it is ready.

Every morning, I meditate and stay in the present. Where am I now? What do I see? What do I feel? Is it the truth? Can I do a bit of good? And then I’m ready for the day.