Not-you will be missed

Modern technology and how we have learned to share and collaborate online have given us a wonderful gift in enabling us to catch up to mutual gatherings and important collective endeavours through a thing we commonly know as a recording. This is actually a “big thing”.

And it has a secret!

It hides a certain nonchalance towards the present moment: while it has brought the blessing of “nothing will be missed ever again”, it hides in its sleeve the curse of “everything will always be missed” too! Whoa!

We are used to looking at ourselves, missing moments and the events that happen in those moments, but we are not so used to looking at the present moment as a living thing, an entity of fluid presence that contains all that is happening in the NOW – and that includes me and you, it includes all of us.

So let us take this, even if only for a moment (pun intended), and notice how any moment to which we give our presence and our attention is one we partake in, and any we do not grant the same gift we “miss”.

But in fact, it is the present moment that misses us, while we are missing it. We miss it as a happening, and it misses us, as in: it longs for us to be there, so we could share our presence with the gathering and the union that is taking place right there and then.

We cannot really miss the present moment as a phenomenon, because we are in it whether consciously or not, but the present moment is always conscious of itself because it is all consciousness, and all Self, so it does miss us when we choose to miss it. In the same way, if you, as a reader, might miss, which miss means missing as not attending, and which means longing, if you choose not to pay attention. There is a game we play, and we play it in exactly this way, when we choose to move away, while the fact is we betray the call to stay, and then return to play when it is kind of late...

When we watch a recording of us not being there, and try to catch up to the past, we play a game of not having missed what we have actually missed, but the moment plays no games; it just misses our presence when it is happening while we choose to ignore it, postpone it, revisit it later, etc. We cannot really play with time like this (we cannot bring it back); we can only catch a memory of what has truly passed.

Why is this worth contemplating? It is very much worth looking into if we are meeting and gathering to do something in the Now. The Now takes into account everyone and everything at all times, and if we choose to actively be there, be present and be attentive, it also takes that into itself, which changes the quality and depth of how we are included in the moment. That is all.

That is indeed the ALL.

Then it is us, choosing to consciously, actively, attentively, be present in it and its happenings as they unfold, in the time they unfold – not before, not after, but while they are actually happening – in the now – live and in life, as it lives in real time.

Real time is reality, and our adherence to it brings us closer to it. Recording reality allows us a slippery grasp at a moment that is no longer here – now, the current moment has become for us the moment in which we reach to relive and rediscover what has already happened, and that cannot be the same as if we were there, because we were not. Revisiting the past in this way is a luxury that offers a second glimpse, but it is not exactly the same; it will never be. 

So let us, for a moment, feel this living Moment.

Feel now! – How it has us in its vast embrace!

Everyone is here in it, there’s no race!

No need to hury or to try

to substitute the living visage of our life

with a reconstructed face.

That “sculpture”, trying hard to bring a fleeting moment back,

records a moment that was always there – full, complete – with only one surreal lack:

our absence from the place where we would place our essence,

had we been there, where there’s Presence –

the real us, in real time, in real place, in sacred space,

carpeted by Love’s embrace

a recording cannot bring back, nor erase.

The moment’s sorrow –

we can feel it too!

For reality cannot be borrowed,

only lived by you!