Soul Sundays- in the middle of the night

...sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, trying to pinpoint that moment, that exact choice, that specific thing you did or said or chose or didn't choose, the moment it all went wrong. And you go over every decision you ever made and you go back and you go back and you go back until you have arrived at some distant universe on some other planet, and you still haven't figured it out, but you are convinced if you could just figure it out all you could know, and then you would know that if it had been THAT moment, THAT EXACT MOMENT, if you had only made some other choice, some BETTER choice, than you would have a different life, a BETTER life.

But you don't have a different life, you have THIS life, and the moment of choice isn't hidden away in some essay from high school, or some love letter from college, or something your mother said or didn't say when you were 7, or 8 or 9 or 5 or 6 or 20 or 30 or 40 or never, or in being born to some other family in some other town by some other sea in some other era. The moment of choice isn't last week, or last year, or with this person or that person or this group of friends of that job or that school or that apartment. The moment of choice is now.

In fact, the life you have is THIS life. It isn't that life. It is never that life, that other life, that different life, that better life, that worse life. It isn't history and it isn't future. It is this moment, this life, this flower, this air, this breath. This child on your lap. This dog on your lap. This book on your lap. It is this spoon in your mouth, this silver spoon, this plastic spoon, this chopstick, no spoon but a finger.

Don't you see? None of it matters, none of it all, because life is only ever now, and that isn't just a group of words strung together in a sentence, those words are a poem, a secret equation hidden in all our hearts, written on all our faces. Those words are an action plan out of fear and into life, because death comes to us all, but if death comes to us all, so has life come to us all, and this is it, my friend, my beloved, my darling other, myself. This is it and I beg you, find yourself, sometime, waking up in the middle of the night looking at THESE hands, THIS person beside you, THIS empty place beside you, THIS bed, THIS bunk, THIS floor, THIS street, whatever and whomever and wherever it is, in THIS city, in THIS town, by THIS sea, in THIS universe, and find some place in your heart where you let yourself cry out 

I AM

I AM

I AM