Good poetry depends on “integrity of the line” – a concept that suggests you should be able to pluck any individual line from a poem and it will stand on its own, with its own integrity.
Living “in the moment” is like this.
We craft a lifetime one breath at a time – out of billions of moments leading one into another, we become who we are here to be. The quality of the whole story depends on the integrity with which you imbue each moment.
Naturally, from the perspective of just one line, it’s impossible to experience the art and presence of the whole poem. The same way you can’t SEE a photograph by staring at a single pixel, you cannot read an entire poem in a single line. Which is the liberating beauty of living in the moment: there’s no room for conclusion or judgment here because you can’t see what it’s all adding up to from inside the NOW.
The big picture depends on what you express in this line – this pixel – this heartbeat in time – and the very best you can do is tend to what is right in front of you, trusting in the way your moment-to-moment presence manifests a meaningful body of work, the totality of which you may never actually know.
The clearest gift you can give yourself is to have NO Conclusions about anything, for everything is forever in-progress and Now is blind to the sum of what’s becoming.
- Now is the point of power.
- Now is the gift to enjoy.
- Now is the wellspring of all.
- Now is the time to appreciate.
- Now is the time to choose
- to be free.
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PS: There’s another important element in any successful poem: the SPACE between the lines. The space in which nothing at all has been written, but through which all substance materializes. A joyful life story revolves around a calm, central core of possibility – the sweet, eternal emptiness inside the fullness of who you are.