Today Is All You Need

Much of what is written about the present moment carries a hidden scolding. Be here now, we are told, as though remembering were a weakness and planning a failure of trust.

I do not believe that, and I do not think it is livable.

Memory is a gift. It is how a friendship deepens over the years. It is how gratitude becomes possible at all, because to be grateful you need a before. When you remember your grandmother’s kitchen and something warms in your chest, you have not left your life. You are being fed by it.

Planning is a gift too. Someone has to think about the winter. Someone has to save the money, book the trip, make the appointment. To plan is to care for a person who does not exist yet, a version of you who will need what you are arranging today.

That is a kind of love.

So the teaching has to be something gentler, and more true.

Here is the difference that helped me most.

The past and the future are places we can visit. They are not places we can live.

You visit the past when you remember. You come back carrying something. Warmth, or grief that has moved a little, or a lesson you can actually use. You return slightly fuller than you left.

You visit the future when you plan. You see what needs doing, you do it or write it down, and then you set it down and come back to the afternoon.

That is visiting, and there is nothing wrong with it.

But sometimes we move in.

We go into the past and stay. The same scene circles and circles. Nothing new is learned on the twentieth pass that was not there on the first. We come back tired, and often a little harder on ourselves than when we left.

We go into the future and stay. The planning never finishes. Every solved problem makes two more. We are not really preparing anymore. We are rehearsing a disaster, hoping that if we go through it enough times it cannot hurt us.

You know the difference in your body. Visiting opens something. Staying too long closes it.

And when you notice you have been gone a while, you do not need to be hard about it. You only need to come back.

There is a passage in the Tao Te Ching, in the sixteenth chapter, that I return to often.

Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.

Lao Tzu does not ask the world to hold still. He does not tell us to stop caring about what comes and goes. Things will keep arriving and leaving. Seasons will turn. Plans will be made and remade. That is simply what living is.

What he offers is a place to stand while it happens.

The word he keeps using in that chapter is returning. All things return to their root, he says, and to return to the root is stillness.

That is what today is. A root. A place you keep coming back to, from which the past can be visited and the future can be prepared for, without either one becoming the house you live in.

Today is not the only day that matters. Yesterday mattered. Tomorrow will matter.

But today is the only door that is open.

Every memory you will ever have is remembered here, in a present moment. Every plan you will ever make is made here. Every kind thing you will ever do for your future self will be done with today’s hands. When tomorrow comes, it will arrive as a today. And if we have not learned how to be in this one, we will not be in that one either.

This is not meant as a warning. It is meant as a relief.

It means you do not have to solve your whole life this afternoon. You are only being asked for the day in front of you. That is a much smaller thing, and a much kinder one.

So let the past be a place you visit. Go there, take what nourishes you, and come home. When you find you have been circling something that will not resolve, be tender with yourself about it, the way you would be with a friend who kept telling you the same story. Then come back to the room you are in.

Let the future be a place you prepare for. Book the holiday. Save the money. Write the plan down where you will find it. Then let go of the rope. You do not have to hold it all afternoon for it to work.

And let today be the ground under your feet while you do both.

With gratitude.

Share

If you liked this essay, you can support the blog by subscribing to it. Here is what you can expect as a subscribed member:

• Early access to podcasts: The Tao Te Ching Podcast (multiple episodes per month).

• Receive a copy of “Peaceful: 7 taoists lessons to inner peace” and participate to the subscribers’ chat.

• Support this blog and my work.

Thank you to all subscribers who make this possible.