“Your Life Is Happening Now”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
March 18, 2007
I love the coming of spring and eagerly await its first signs: First, crocuses and daffodils. Then plum and pear trees beginning to bloom. Then mornings filled with the melody of birdsong. Then on some day in late winter, there is a breeze as warm as dog’s breath - - a certain promise that winter’s cold, rain, and dreariness will not last forever, that there is something more to come.
From an astronomical perspective, there is nothing so miraculous about spring. Our changing seasons in temperate climates are nothing but the result of our planet’s 23-degree tilt and the variation in direct sunlight we receive as the earth revolves around the sun. At about 5:07 p.m. on Tuesday this week, we will be at the point on our planet’s journey around the sun when the northern hemisphere receives as much direct sunlight as the southern hemisphere.
However, spring is so much more than an astronomical event.
I feel differently with the coming of spring. It’s as if something that was dead in me is alive again, and I wonder to myself, “How could I have forgotten what it’s like to feel this way.” While I have little belief in the resurrection of the body, springtime erases any doubt I ever may have had about the possibility of the resurrection of the spirit.
It makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t move somewhere where it was more like spring all year round. On the other hand, as the 17th century poet Anne Bradstreet said, “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.”
From the changes I see in others around me, I’m not the only one so affected by this turn of the seasons.
Yet spring means more than feeling differently. Throughout human history, the coming of spring has become a metaphor for the seasons and cycles of our own lives.
The slow, steady, persistent increase in daylight since the winter solstice finally making a dramatic difference in the world reminds us that our slow, steady, persistent efforts may someday make a dramatic difference too.
Nature miraculously coming back to life after a long, difficult barren winter reminds us of the possibility that we may not only endure but triumph over the long, difficult, barren times in our own lives.
But most of all, spring is a reminder to me to wake up, to snap out of my winter doldrums. It’s a reminder to me to live in the present moment. It’s a reminder to me to pay attention to the mystery, the miracle, the beauty, and the wonder of life. It’s a reminder to me to enjoy life now.
But what do I mean by all this?
I think many of us fall into some common traps.
One trap that I suspect many of us fall into is not living in the present moment.
The society in which we live does not encourage us to live in the present moment. In fact, it sometimes seems like we spend our whole lives getting ready for what's going to happen next.
Pre-school prepares us for kindergarten; kindergarten, for elementary school; elementary school; for junior high school; junior high school, for high school; high school for college; college for our first job, our first job for our second job; our second job for our third job; our whole working life for retirement, and well, let’s stop there.
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats spoke of this, saying, "When I think of all the books I have read, wise words heard, anxieties given to parents…of hopes I have had…my own life seems to me a preparing for something that never happens."
More recently, the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich says that the most important value that middle-class parents must inculcate in their children is the value of delayed gratification because without learning how to put off pleasure, the children will never make it through the years of education necessary to maintain their middle class status.
The problem with this is that if you spend the first twenty or even thirty years of your life always getting ready for what's coming next, it's hard to switch gears later in life when you've finally got to the place you wanted to get to.
I suspect that many of us put off our lives, telling ourselves, "Well, I'll really start living just as soon as I get through…" and then we name whatever calamity we're currently experiencing.
We tell ourselves, "As soon as I finish school" or "as soon as the kids get into pre-school" or "as soon as the kids finish college" or "as soon as I retire," or "as soon as my spouse retires," then everything is going to be settled and peaceful and okay, and then, we tell ourselves, we'll really be able to enjoy our lives.
We would probably all live better lives if we used the phrase, “as soon as” a lot less than we do.
Of course, a few of us don’t spend our time living in the future, but living in the past, although its not really the past, but some romanticized version of it, and we tell ourselves how wonderful our lives and the world used to be.
Oh, I don’t want to suggest that it’s always a bad thing to focus on the future or the past. I believe there a few times in each of our lives when our present is so overwhelming, so difficult, so painful, that the most important thing we can tell ourselves is, “My life will not be like this forever. I will not feel like this forever. It will one day be different. It will one day not be as bad as it is now,” and during those times we hold on for dear life to some imagined possible future, and day after day put one foot in front of the other in order to get there. And strangely enough, I’ve found what’s most consoling during these times is not happy memories of sometime in the past when our lives were better, but memories of other difficult, challenging, painful times in our lives that we were somehow able to survive.
Nevertheless, in general, I suspect many of us spend far too much time living our lives in either the past or the future.
A second trap I suspect many of fall into - - or at least I do - - is not really paying attention to the world and our lives.
We fall into routines. We fall into routines of seeing the world the same way. We become inured and dull. We live our lives with blinders on, just focused on the next task ahead of us, and with such a narrow focus - - with such a narrow perspective - - it’s so easy for us - - or at least it is for me - - to get so quickly bent out of shape about life’s small annoyances, about the things that don’t really matter, about the things which seem so important at the time but in the long run don’t mean much at all, and to lose sight of what’s most important, what matters in the long run.
But you want to know the worst thing about falling into routines, falling into ruts? They lead to a third trap, and that is the illusion that our lives will go on forever.
Have you ever seen Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town?
One of the most powerful scenes for me in that play involves Emily, a young woman from the town of Grovers’ Corner who has died in childbirth. In the scene, she is allowed to come back from the grave to relive her twelfth birthday. We see her coming down the stairs on her birthday morning. Her mother greets her lovingly and comments on each gift as she opens the packages. Then from off stage we hear her father calling. Emily is overcome with emotion and says to the Stage Manager: “I can’t. I can’t go on. Oh! Oh. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” She then breaks down sobbing.
“I didn’t realize,” she says. “So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back - - up the hill - - to my grave,” she says to the Stage Manager. “But first; Wait! One more look. Good-by. Good-by, world. Good by, Grover’s Corners...Mama and Papa. Good by to clocks ticking..and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
Through her tears she asks the Stage Manager:
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - - every, every minute?
“No,” replies the Stage Manager... “The saints and poets, maybe - - they do some.”
I learned something recently that I didn’t know. Because of the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun, the earth actually picks up speed when it’s closest to the sun - - in early January and early July.
But this isn’t how it feels. I know that in my own life, each year that I get older, it feels like the earth is picking up speed every year. I’ve been married ten years now. I’ve been minister of this church almost seven years. I’ve lived in my current house five years - - longer than I’ve lived anywhere else for a while. And the days, months, and years seem to slip away faster and faster.
This is why spring is so important to me. I don’t know quite how or why, but it is as if spring is nature’s way of knocking me upside the head and saying, “Stop living your life in the future or the past and start paying attention to what’s happening now, because now is what it’s all about.”
In our hymnal, there’s a piece by the third-century Hindu priest Kalidasa that makes the same point. Kalidasa writes: “Look to this day!. For it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course like all the verities and the realities of your existence: the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendor of beauty; for yesterday is but a dream, and tomorrow is only a vision; but today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore to this day.”
Spring also seems to be nature’s way of saying, “Lift up your head and take a look at the world around you.” Or it’s as if nature is saying, “Stop walking around like you’re half asleep,” or “Take off those blinders you’re wearing. Stop focusing on your next insignificant step and look around you. Pretty miraculous, isn’t it? Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Pretty beautiful, isn’t it? And while you’re at it, take a look at yourself in the mirror. Don’t you know how lucky you are just to be alive?”
The theologian Matthew Fox in his book Original Blessing: “If there is any conclusion that can be reached ... it is this: that the Creator God is a gracious, an abundant, and a generous host [or] hostess. [He or she] has spread out for our delight a banquet that was twenty billion years in the making. A banquet of rivers and lakes, of rain and of sunshine [and of stars], of rich earth and of amazing flowers, of handsome trees and of dancing fishes, of contemplative animals and of whistling winds, of dry and wet seasons, of cold and hot climates...God declared that this banquet is ‘very good’ and so are we, blessing ourselves, invited to the banquet.”
But how often, to continue Fox’s metaphor, let this invitation sit unopened underneath the pile up paperwork on our desks?
I sometimes think if all of us were really paying attention each of us would wake up every morning, open our windows and yell, “Wow, one more day!” and then go outside and hugs the neighbors, who would be doing the same thing.
And then there’s this…Spring, like Fall, is a season of transition and change, and reminds us of life’s transience. The plum and pear blossoms that are blooming now will litter the ground after just a few short weeks. In every spring breeze, there is also the whisper of fall.
It’s as if spring is nature’s way of saying, “Savor every moment of life now, because it doesn’t last forever.”
When I took English literature in high school, one of my favorite poems was Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the first stanza of which is the familiar, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/Old time is still a-flying:/And this same flower that smiles to-day/Tomorrow will be dying.”
Perhaps the reason I liked the poem was that to a 17-year-old male, the idea that you could use poetry to entice members of the opposite sex to “make much of time” was a revolutionary idea. But I liked the sentiment as well.
Another poem which expresses a similar sentiment is “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon: “I got out of bed/on two strong legs./It might have been/otherwise. I ate / cereal, sweet/ milk, ripe, and flawless / peach. It might/ have been otherwise. / I took the dog uphill / to the birch wood./ All morning I did/ the work I love. / At noon I lay down / with my mate. It might / have been otherwise. / We ate dinner together / at a table with silver/ candlesticks. It might / have been otherwise. / I slept in a bed / in a room with paintings / on the walls, and / planned another day / just like this day. / But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.
A few years ago I saw Bill Moyer’s PBS documentary On Our Own Terms, in which he talked to people who were the process of dying. He interviewed one man, Dr. Bill Bartholome, who was dying of esophageal cancer, who said, “If you don't expect to see spring when fall comes and then you are around and get to see spring, you don't experience it as spring; you experience it as a miracle."
But isn’t this how each of us should really experience it every year?
The traps of life are many, but these are three that I suspect a few of us fall into: We don’t live in the present as much as we should. When we do, we get too narrowly focused on the trivial, and forget to look around us and pay attention to the miracle, wonder, and beauty of life. And sometimes we forget that it won’t all go on forever.
Spring reminds us: Live in the present moment as much as you can. Look around you. And enjoy it while it lasts, because it won’t be forever.
May we have eyes to see, ears to listen, noses to smell, tongues to taste, and fingers to feel the invitation this season offers us.
So may it be. Amen.