A Taste of Ambrosia
More and more I’ve come to realize there isn’t any place better than here, any time better than now. Of course that’s an old truism. And if you’re anything like me, because you have heard it a hundred times, it’s easy to think to yourself that you’ve “got it” and let its truth slide on by. Don’t.
Heed the sage advice that the four most dangerous words we can utter are “I already know that.” Just for a couple moments, let yourself pause and consider the gifts the present offers.
Accepting as a fact that the present is full of mystery and wonder and living it in your very own tangible, touchable experience are two wholly different things. The fact tastes like cardboard; the experience tastes like ambrosia.
What’s happening for me as I dive more fully into living in happiness is that I’m developing quite a taste for that ambrosia, that life-enhancing nectar of the gods, called “Now.” And I’m discovering more and more ways to invite it into my awareness. I’m learning to notice it more frequently and to stay in it for longer periods of time.
In our too-busy, rush-rush lives, attuning to the present doesn’t come naturally. We are, in fact, conditioned to avoid it in countless numbers of ways. And that’s a shame, a real loss. It contributes to our dis-ease and steals from us the sense of life’s majesty.
But the good news is that the present is always here for us, always offering us its richness. It’s just a matter of stopping to notice, to see what it holds.
It’s that “stopping” that’s the key. Like the beverage slogan says, it really is the pause that refreshes. It’s pausing in your thoughts, in your actions, and taking a moment to feel what you’re feeling, to hear the sounds, see the colors and movements around you, to realize you are wholly alive, a sensual, conscious being in the midst of an unfathomable mystery.
It’s noticing the sky, and realizing it’s not wallpaper but a dancing atmosphere, filled with the breath of all that lives, expanding beyond the curtain of light to endless worlds of stars and galaxies and nebulae. It’s blinking your eyes and feeling the warm, moist glide of your eyelids as they close and open. It’s feeling the temperature and weight and flow of air as you breathe, the placement of your tongue in your mouth, the alignment of your posture, the brush of your clothing against your skin, the texture of your fingerprints as you rub your thumbs together. And all of it is a mystery, however many pieces of it we name and put together.
And that’s just a sip of it. Just one sip of all that’s there to be tasted. Give yourself a moment of it. It’s right here, after all. Right now. Always.
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