One Moment, Please
by Alan Cohen

While driving across the Bar Bridge on my way to the San Francisco airport, I got stuck in a traffic snarl. After spending three days at a relaxing retreat, I could feel my body contract as I began to worry that I might miss my plane. The contrast between ease and fear was staggering.

Then I heard a voice, that of my higher knowing. It said, "Don't miss this moment; it is all you have."

I took several deep breaths and looked around me. The autumn sun glistened on the shimmering bay. A soft breeze caressed my arms and face. People in their cars around me were laughing, on their way to a day of play. I tuned on the radio and found some good music. Love was not far away; it was right where I was.

As I began to regain my peace, the inner voice spoke again: "it is one thing to miss the plane, but it is quite another to miss the moment." I could always catch another plane; but the only moment I could truly catch was the one at hand.

AWARENESS SETS IN

I arrived at the airport with ample time to catch the plane, which taught me that all the energy I had spent in worry was completely useless. Even if I had missed the plane, the energy would have been wasted; worry has never gotten anyone to an airport earlier or forced a plane to wait. Trust, on the other hand, has created miracles.

When I reached a hotel later on in my trip, I discovered I had left some clothing hanging in a closet I another hotel two thousand miles away. Immediately I felt the pit of my stomach bottom out as I realized the articles were two long-time favorites. I picked up the phone to call the hotel to see if the articles had turned up in lost and found, but I found myself hesitating. I realized that I didn't want to call because I didn't really want to retrieve the items. One was a sweatshirt given to me years ago, and another was a casual shirt I have customarily worn on plane flights for a long time. Both felt very old, laden with memories and history I no longer wanted to carry with me. I put down the phone and smiled. I was done with the shirts. They did not belong to me now, and I would not call them to me.

A Course in Miracles advises us to affirm, "The past is over. It can touch me not." That is, unless I choose to drag the past into the present with my thoughts. Every time we haul an old painful memory into the now, we are phoning a distant hotel and asking them to send our old garbage to our new abode. They will do so if we ask them. Then we wonder why our present looks like our past.

We are under no obligation to replay old scenes; all of life is optional, including reliving ancient pain. Every day we are free to choose anew. If today looks gruesome like yesterday and your life is a long replay of Ground Hog Day, do not blame karma, the environment or other people. Instead, look at the choices you are making today.

Years ago, I joined a group that was forming in upstate New York, where we found an encampment of cockroaches in our new food pantry. Dauntless metaphysicians, we asked our teacher how we attracted cockroaches in a new living situation.

"You brought the cockroaches in the boxes of food from New York City," Hilda explained. "You are carrying your old consciousness into a new place. Don't allow little unsanitary annoying thoughts to pollute the new life you are trying to create. You must weed them out and start your new life free of the old one, and all that came with it."

We cannot live in the moment, while inwardly pandering to old beliefs. At key points we must burn our bridges and dive wholeheartedly into the moment. At one of my Hawaiian retreats I found a participant in the phone booth at midnight sending stock market orders to New York via his laptop computer. His brow was wrinkled and he was obviously stressing.

"I thought you came to be on a retreat!" I jokingly remained him.

"I have to get these transactions done!" he muttered.

I had to laugh at the scenario. This man flew five thousand miles and paid a considerable amount of money to a take a vacation form the pressures of his daily routine. Beneath swaying palm tress under a magnificent full moon there he sat, balled up in the stock market a world away. You can leave an environment physically, but unless you leave it behind mentally and emotionally, it will ravage the beauty at hand. You can put your body in paradise, but unless you place your spirit there, you walk it not.

We can frolic on the beach, or E-mail the office. We are always free to choose.

©1999 New Frontier Magazine. All rights reserved. Alan Cohen is the author of the best-selling The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore. To order Alan's new book I had It All The Time, or a free catalog of his books, tapes including his workshop/retreat schedule call 1-800-462-3013. For information on Alan's Mastery Training in Hawaii, call 1-808-575-9248.

To Front of Issue 2

HOME

Check out Asheville, NC "America's New Age Mecca"