This Very Moment

We have a bird feeder in our backyard now, which sounds like nothing, but this morning it is everything. Two birds – maybe the mean bluejays – are doing a call and response, one on top of the bird feeder, the other on the edge of the roof. I can see them both from the window where I sit at my desk every morning, trying to make sense of the world with my words. And the birds are here with me, one trilling a two-note call, the other answering with the same. They are not in rhythm. The bird perched on the feeder, the responder, waits a few beats, as if expecting a third bird to join in. They have something going on that I’m not privy to, can’t understand, and don’t need to.

It's rare that I would live only in this moment. Here. Now. I tend to spend too much time in the past, rehashing conversations, polishing my regrets with different outcomes, or I travel to the nonexistent future, planning, anticipating, worrying (usually in that order). I am not mindful. Case in point, I never remember if I closed the garage door for the night, so as I’m crawling into bed I think hard to recall if my finger pushed the clear, orange button beside the door into the kitchen. Yes, I did. Or was that yesterday? My mind was not in that moment; it was either lurching backward or hurtling forward, which doesn’t help me at this late hour. So, I put on shoes and walk outside to check the garage door. To see it, I have to open the back gate, the one near the bird feeder, and, of course, I see that the garage door is closed. I took care of this task without conscious thought, but that rarely brings me comfort. I accomplish nothing by letting my mind wander back and forth. Being in the here and now takes effort, and so the birds are helping this morning. I send them a silent “thank you” before they fly away.

In a sermon to an oppressed group of people—Jews living under the boot of the Roman Empire—Jesus asked a rhetorical question: “Can worry add even one step to the length of your life’s journey?” After he talked about birds who neither sow nor reap, and grass that is clothed despite its blink-of-an-eye existence, Jesus announced to the crowd that tomorrow will have trouble of its own, as if they didn’t know. Tomorrow and its potential tragedies are what we all worry about, and this keeps us up at night. We rely on oral tradition to bring us these stories about Jesus’ sermons and parables and teachings, so I like to imagine that he could have added this: “And yesterday had its own trouble that we cannot change by churning the events around in our minds.” As if we didn’t know.

You can know a thing and live like you’ve never heard it. The Jews living in the Roman Empire knew that tomorrow would bring trouble, as it always did. They had far more to fear than I do, and it was a temptation to revel in the glorious past of their forefathers, back to that short era in history when they were safe and thriving. As much as we would like to believe that Jesus was talking to us in that sermon, he wasn’t. But we can lean in and eavesdrop and know that these wise words also apply to us.

Tomorrow has trouble ahead, but you’ll handle it. Yesterday was a mess, but you survived it. And now, you are here in this moment, where there are birds to watch and hydrangeas to cut, and people to hug. I end my day with the prayer of Julian of Norwich, an anchorite who lived during the Middle Ages and survived the Black Plague and her deathbed.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I don’t always believe this for tomorrow and yesterday, but in this moment, which is all we really have, the prayer is always true.