The Answer is Always Right Here

It was in a noisy, crowded bar in Vancouver, BC after playing a show with the political punk band I was in at the time when I heard, and understood for the first time, those words.  

We had taken separate cars up and half the band had gotten times messed up, resulting in a rather frantic and immediate entry to the stage once everyone had arrived.  No sound check.  We just plugged in and went.  Sometimes that’s what you have to do.  

We stayed after to see the other bands, though noisy bars have never been my thing.  I don’t have the ears, or the voice, for it.  I don’t want anyone shouting in my ear, and I don’t want to shout in anyone else’s ear.  It just makes me cough, anyway.

My mind wandered, as it often does in proper pendulum fashion....a wide and graceful slow motion swoop back and forth between past and future.  (Isn’t it inevitable that it has to pass through the present each time?)  

If the grass is always greener on the other side (in the other tense?), then our Selves are always better over there, too.  If we can remove ourselves enough with a projection onto the future then maybe we won’t be burdened by us when the time comes.  If time heals everything then eventually it will just take the parts of us we don’t like away.....right?  Instead of removing the Big Bad Wolf of our ego and judgement, we would rather wait for time to take away everything that provokes it.  Typical ;)

Whatever answers we may seek, we can only find them right here.  This moment.  Even if the journey is 1,000 miles long there becomes here eventually.  Nothing can be discovered outside of now.  In fact....nothing can be said, felt, seen, experienced, feared, sung, drunk, heard, touched, celebrated, broken, destroyed, or even noticed outside of now.  

Once discovered, NOW is a vast and infinite canvas...yet we spend so much of our time trying to create our Life's Masterpiece safely hidden on the edges that don’t really exist.  You have all the room you need to create your incredible and unique work of art.  Don’t worry about taking up someone else’s space.  There is room in the moment for everyone and if we all could get together there, well, I dare say magic might happen.  (And I dare say it does.)