As I ramble along life’s calendar, each day slightly more at peace than before, it strikes me as an odd truism that the rational mind, that most vaunted human attribute, is the source of most unrelieved suffering.
The soul pointlessly craves meaning, a task taken up by the rational mind through its constrained capacity to understand. This exercise of life through perspective is a confounding mystification beyond the narrow definitions of rationality’s comprehension.
Does the future or past exist, or are these elevated artifacts nothing more than the mind’s way of adapting to reality, of making sense of itself? Similarly, are regret and hope free from purpose, a facade of imagination without creativity’s substance, mere relics of the contrivances of time?
The present moment is everything. To be in the moment, fully engaged, aware, every sense tingling in unsullied joy, of being, not expecting the future or past to stipulate an escape from the present and its intrinsic suffering, is the recognition of supreme unity.
To be fully alive is to accept all suffering as features of the present moment and nothing more, just occurrences to be accepted and perceived as the moment dictates.
Honoring the present moment sustains me through the progression of Parkinson’s disease, wiping clear the fog from the mirror of the present’s extant splendor.