The concept of "living in the now" is an extremely important goal to me, possibly the most important of all goals. Furthermore, it's one that I have come to accept; that constantly getting a little bit closer to understanding it is the most I can ever hope for. The way our brain is designed to function doesn't allow an utterly complete understanding of the now, and that's a good thing. Not only does that allow us to progress in life but it makes it a little easier to deal with. The ongoing mortal quest for the now doesn't bother me, for now. It used to, but that's the past, you see where I'm going with this? I'll divert for a few paragraphs with some stories pertaining to this matter that are mildly relevant at best because of course, they are now just stories of the past after all.
When I first moved to Portland I saw a sticker that caught my attention. Well, maybe it didn't catch my attention the first time but I remember the moment it finally did very well because there were about twenty of the same sticker all over a bus stop and I realized that I had seen it a few times before. It was the simplest sticker in design and message I had ever seen. It was black with white text using a bold but unassuming font and in all caps read: NOW IS ALL YOU HAVE. Whatever the motivation was for whoever put the stickers all over town was irrelevant to me at the time. I did not try and guess what type of organization it was trying to promote within Portland or elsewhere. It did cause me to pause and consider what the phrase meant to me at that moment -which I found out later was the first and foremost motivation for the stickers. The second motivation was in fact band promotion for the Portland based psych rock group "NIAYH" (N-eye-yah). I was in a band-with-a-message myself at the time called "The Repair". It was a three piece all vocal group comprised of two female singers one being my sister and me doing human beat box. About a month after my moment with the stickers, The Repair was invited to perform at a small music festival called "The One Family Gathering" located in the desert about a seven hour drive from Portland. It was there that I first met the guys from NIAYH. I was quite impressed by their show and later sat down at a community fire pit where the band was relaxing at and after introducing myself I suggested we make some videos together when we got back to Portland. A week later I went to a show of theirs that happened to be at a venue only a few blocks from my house and filmed it. The only camera I had access to at the time was a cheap little digital handy-cam I got off Craigslist for fifty dollars. I wanted to impress them so I turned the footage into a psychedelic music video comprised of some home made effects using multiple televisions feed-backing light into each other. The result was a huge success given the limited tools I had to work with and subsequently started an artistic collaboration with the band that lasted over the next several years.
It was apparent from the start that this group including the bigger circle of friends and friends of friends that partied together with the band were not my typical type to be associated with. In fact, is was quite awkward at times. In the beginning, besides having a mutual love for music and anything that pertains to expressing one's self (art in general), we shared very little in common. I didn't dress like them, I didn't talk like them, I really didn't even behave like them for the most part. I stuck around for two reasons.
The first is that despite our clashing cultures, the group accepted me instantly which is very unique in a divided youth scene in a city that prides itself on being particularly hip. I hung around a group in Seattle briefly years before that appeared similar in style on the surface but I quickly found out that I was not welcome at their exclusive social gatherings.
The second is over time we learned from each other that underneath all the perceived social laws that often times seem to govern, we shared an attitude of progress and striving to become better at our art. It was the idea of not settling for anything less than the best you can be and within that taking specific effort to appreciate the process and not just the result.
Over many parties that included everything from 50+ person jam sessions to a human cake, one by one I asked each member of NIAYH what "Now Is All You Have" meant, each time acting like I never had asked anyone before. Instead of a common mission statement delivered as if it were rehearsed like one of their songs I got five different insightful answers from unique perspectives. I'm not going to try and recall those five accounts of what was said to me, rather I'm going to take this next paragraph and try to explain what it means to me currently.
To live in the now isn't just about appreciating the present moment for what it is. It's much more than that. It's about dealing with anxiety and depression. it's about achieving happiness through being content. It's feeling a sense of belonging, a sensation of oneness to the Earth including everyone and everything on it. When broken down, meditation is basically deciding to take a moment and relish the now. All the other benefits of meditation will be learned naturally if you do this. I have to admit that for years I struggled with the concept arguing that if I ignored the past and the future then my life would be in shambles. What I've come to realize is that living in the now is not about ignoring the past and future it's about appreciating the present moment no matter what it is and thus you can appreciate the past and future as wonderful moments you appreciated and will appreciate. If you didn't appreciate them when you had them they wouldn't be remembered as moments you appreciated. The same goes for the future; if you don't anticipate that you will appreciate the coming moment, you probably wont when it arrives. You don't have time to decide to appreciate a moment, you just do or you don't. The present has nothing to do with time; time doesn't exist in the present. Time doesn't freeze or slow down when you reach this level of understanding, it quite simply just doesn't apply. If time were a factor in the present, it wouldn't be the present at all it would be somewhere before or after it.
I've learned a very simple way to remind myself to feel the present moment throughout my day without causing my head to spin with the physics and philosophy behind it. It's simply to breathe, and not just any old breathing but taking a long controlled deep breath and exhale slowly. While doing this I think about nothing else but how wonderful it is to be a human being on planet Earth taking in air provided for me to be alive. On the inhale I concentrate on the feeling of all my organs including my heart and brain responding subtly to the new oxygen and how dependent they are on that single breath. The small increase in heart rate. The feeling of being slightly more awake and clear in my thoughts. Even the muscles in my back doing their small but necessary job in assisting to the expansion of my torso in just the right way to allow my lungs to inflate. Then I exhale and leave all those thoughts behind and just be.
Another thing I often think about to raise my awareness of the present is time travel. I find that thinking about something impossible helps me have a better grip on the possible. Also, taking myself intentionally out of the present helps me realize it's there in the first place. The way my little mental exercise works is instead of thinking about what it would be like to travel into the future or past, what I would encounter, and how I would deal with it; I pretend that I am from the past and just traveled to here and now. That way it's much more real. Everything I see and hear around me is from the future and is absolutely stunning -good and bad. I see a coffee shop absolutely full of people glued to their laptops and smart phones and wonder what a person (me at the moment) would say if he just zapped here from the seventeen hundreds. There are positive and negative reactions that conjure up. For instance I think about how much less connective conversation we have when electronic devices are with us at all times and what effect that has on society. At the same time I think about how much more valuable information the technology is allowing us to receive and how it's rapidly expanding our knowledge and overall interconnectedness across the internet. At least I think that's what seventeen hundreds Jon would think. That's just one small example of course. Most importantly and amazingly, playing this silly little mind game allows me to feel everything around me easier. Think for a moment how different it would be to actually travel through time and be in another era as opposed to watching a movie about it. I can guarantee you that if we could travel into the future, as soon as we arrived and stepped out of the time machine we would instantly have a whole new feeling and meaning of what it is to exist in that very moment. Everything from the air we breathe, to the speed people walk and talk, to the collective human consciousness frequency would be different. If I concentrate hard enough I can almost feel the unique sensation of right now, right now -and it's absolutely incredible. Which brings me to one final example of why time is meaningless and a flimsy framework for us to exist in at best.
The speed at which we live at can often times be overwhelming. As I said before, time doesn't really exist like we commonly think of it. It's all relative to what you're comparing it to. A year to a five year old seems longer because it actually is. It's one fifth of his or her entire perception of time. A year to an eighty year old is one of eighty others by comparison and thus is actually shorter, not according to simple math but according to that individual's perception (more complex mathematics can account for this). I believe the same is true for the Earth and even the universe. As time passes it essentially creates more of it and by comparison seems to travel faster and faster. Instead of panicking that I'm not using this precious ever increasing time wisely, I think of it as more evidence that we are infinite beings that aren't actually bound by the laws of time at all, and that makes me happy to be here right now.
I could write about this subject for many more pages but I fear my tangents would start to loose focus fairly quickly. I'll leave you with a short video I shot a while ago of the band NIAYH. It documents when they drove their bus to the County fair in Eugene to put on a renegade show in the campground. It was supposed to serve as just a teaser for a feature length film about the band and the meaning behind the statement "Now is All You Have" but because of lacking funds the project got put on hold and then the band dissolved over the next year. The good thing is, it isn't cut like a teaser and the piece stands on it's own quite well. Here's the link:
I saw The Repair in April of 2008. You guys were really good.
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