You're Here Now!

I recently finished reading Eat Pray Love and also saw the movie shortly thereafter.  Just for the record, I really enjoyed the book but thought the movie was quite unsatisfying.  (And it bugs me that the only version of the book now available has to have Julia Roberts on the cover!) The book seems to follow a true search for God, meaning, and healing, while the movie glosses too quickly over the deeper parts and by moving so quickly seems very shallow.  I have some issues with the healthiness of moving in rapid succession through divorce, new relationship, end of new relationship, beginning of still another new relationship that is now characterized as the perfect culmination of a one-year journey.  Condense all of this into a movie and it happens at breakneck speed.  In the book, the final relationship evolves over a very long friendship (still too soon, in my humble opinion).  And the movie basically leaves out the many parts that show that this is indeed a search for God (albeit sometimes a different version of God than I might posit).  I chose to ignore some of the flaws of the book and looked for the nougats!

Several things struck me in this book, but one has to do with being in the present (connected to my last post on not borrowing tomorrow's problems).  Here's the quote from the book:

The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought (her reference to the "monkey mind" where thoughts swing from limb to limb) is that you are never where you are.  You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in the moment.  It's something like the habit of my dear friend Susan, who -- whenever she sees a beautiful place -- exclaims in near panic, "It's so beautiful here!  I want to come back here someday!"  and it takes all of my persuasive powers to try to convince her that she is already here.  IF you're looking for union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem.  There's a reason they call God a presence -- because God is right here, right now.  In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

I have begun to use this phrase in my head (and out loud with some near and dear to me):  "But You're Here NOW!"  What a great reminder to live in the present and appreciate our lives as we are living them, instead of "digging in the past" or "poking at the future."  You're already here!