When will you arrive? How will you know? Will there be a deep feeling of satisfaction? A certain number in your bank account or on your pay check? Maybe you’ll fit into your wedding dress again. Perhaps it’s when the grief is over, your final paper is submitted, the bankruptcy is done, the kids have made it through college, the addition on your house is complete. Or maybe it’ll be when you master that new move, stop waking up feeling tired, get laid, get hired, get enlightened.

What’s your arrival point? Do you have one? Most of us do, if only vaguely. Some future fantasy lingering, that when things are a little better, a little different…there’s a bit more time, money, peace, freedom…a little less tumult, stress, pain and pressure.

We just need to get through this next phase. Once that’s taken care of, things will feel different. I am so excited for that thing…you know, that ripe dangling fruit of tomorrow, that tomorrow in my mind where the irritating noise of the construction down the street is not, where this chronic pain has subsided, where my partner is just a little more loving and the weather is a little less shitty.

Out there in that future where reality IS A LITTLE LESS REAL…

This too shall pass.

Words of comfort in times of pain and words of pain in times of comfort. An oft used saying…one that makes not being where you want to be or feeling how you want to feel, a little more tolerable. And while everything changes and all things pass, our human experience, while we’re experiencing it, will not. What then shall we do then with the impulse to be elsewhere as our near constant companion? We may ask…

WHAT IF I WAS HERE FOR TEN THOUSAND MORE LIFETIMES?

Here, right now, as things are and as things aren’t. What must we stop?  Hoping. Fantasizing. Waiting. Sidestepping. Manipulating. Coercing. Holding our breath or our love or our value back from the world.

What must we do? MOVE. In the bodies we’re in, with all their hints pain or weakness, strong musculature or muffin tops. BE STILL. With all of our panic and fear and certainty that much must get done, sit in that. LOVE. Past the contractions of hurt and anger and numbness. LOVE. With such tenderness and vulnerability we can feel our own death at our fingertips. CHOOSE. To ruthlessly expunge that which is killing us, rotting us from the inside and the outside. SURRENDER. To our deepest aches, to what it will take to be fulfilled, to the pain that that may never happen. RADICAL ACCEPTANCE BECOMES OUR MOST INTIMATE COMPANION. Moment after damn moment become vibrantly real, any impulse to escape, violently slaughtered. For there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to get to, no address we will one day arrive at. It will always be how it’s always been, in flux, in pain and in joy, just like now, just like yesterday, just like tomorrow.