Message from Port Reality: Today is All We've Got

I'm waking up, my eyes still closed, my brain not yet docked at Port Reality. I turn in bed, fingertips brushing across my expanded waistline. In microseconds, an internal dialog between two unknown Me's take place.

"You didn't used to be so thick around the middle," observes A.

"I know," says B, defensively. "I'll take it off."

"How?"

"Huh?"

"How? How will you take it off?"

"I don't know. I mean, I wasn't always like this. I can be what I was, can't I?"

"Not necessarily."

It was here, on the heels of this rude insinuation that full wakefulness came over me. It came with the realization that for all its blessings, memory is also a curse. Memory can delude. Memory can paralyze.

I remember a time when I was thinner, when I wore a 32 and not a 36 pant, when I cruised the outfield with, if something less than blinding speed, at least without taxing my lungs. I remember and in remembering I underestimate the passage of time and its effects. Memory and the preposterous notion that because I can remember being thinner, I will be thinner once again, was mocking me without my being aware of it.

Memory causes us to live carelessly.

Remembering being in shape makes you think that you can easily be in shape again.

Remembering the first kiss and the fact that she's been there next to you every night for years can make you heedless of nurturing the relationship that only began with the kiss.

Remembering the first day of the little one's kindergarten makes you less sensitive to the passage of time, of all the nameless subsequent moments to which you also need to attend.

Life is more than milestones. It's a profusion of unique, unfolding moments.

Memory makes us think that we can go back to where we were before. But we can't. We can never go back. Yesterday is dead. Today is all we have. We can remember the past and anticipate the future, but now is the only theater in which we can perform. And we can't control the future, either. But we can live now with every ounce of ourselves or let it pass unmarked, un-experienced, un-infused with our commitment or passion.

I believe that this heedlessness of time is something that goes with a collective or almost-genetic memory with which we're all born. Eternity, according to the Bible, isn't forever and ever so much as it's the absence of time. Before the rough encroachments of sin on human experience, we, who were made in God's image, weren't meant to experience time, only eternity, only now. But that's not the reality we inhabit now, is it?

Day-in and day-out, our eternally-biased memory collides with our everyday reality. In spite of what memory tries to delude us into believing, we realize, as I did in waking to my interior conversation, that there are no do-overs.

But I also realize that, thank God, there are start-overs.

"God," I pray, as I throw my feet over the side of the bed and stretch them for the floor, "thank You for my memories, good and bad. Help me to use them today. Help me to make the most of these now moments because, right now, I realize that they're all I've got."