I am trying to live one day at a time, in what some call ‘the nowness of now’.  It’s not easy. The mind flits, the eyes wander, on screen and off. Too often I start a day with good intentions: slow mornings with coffee and a book, but by nightfall, I have nothing much to show than hours crammed with buzzes that add up to nothing. And the next day, I repeat.

T.S. Elliot writes of ‘timeless moments,’ when we triumph over the straitjacket of time and discover ‘the still point at the heart of the dance, the unattended moments.’ Meister Eckhart spoke of ‘the eternal now;’ Kierkegaard of our need ‘to cram today with eternity and not with the next day.’ The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh opined that all civilizations are built on the depth that comes from contemplative attention:

‘In the world of poetic experience, it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.’  

Yet, as the Scottish poet Don Paterson, confessed in his book of reflections, that the time when he has actually lived in the present moment amount to no more than a single day. The great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda echoes a similar thought in ‘Keeping Quiet:’

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves.

So, I’m trying my best to befriend silence in a deeper way, to tap the delicious paradox of “doing much by doing nothing,” before the sands of the hourglass moves too swiftly. I do not say I have succeeded but I give myself to it, to the music of the silence in between.

THE SILENCE IN BETWEEN (after ‘The Monkey’ by Madeleine L’Engle)

Silence is dangerous
We never permit it.
We never allow silence.
If sometimes it catches us unaware,
we waste no time
in screeching across it
And shatter it to echoing fragments.
You never can tell;
if we listened to the silence
we might discover
that we can be
as big as the world.