Being Now: The Most Difficult Challenge of My Life

I still remember my father’s words: “Becca, you don’t know what it’s like to live in the middle.”

I was sixteen. This was soon after one of the biggest moments of my life. Yet I was depressed.

On a fall morning, 30 years ago, inside the covered dome of what is now Lifetime Fitness, my tennis team, our rival team, a smattering of high school classmates who had skipped school, and all the parents watched as the #2 doubles team battled for the deciding regional win. Usually, it didn’t matter much if the doubles pairs won. We had four of the best singles players in the state. Maybe even the country.

But one of them lost. And then our other two doubles pairs lost.

And suddenly, it came down to me and my partner, Maria. Later, the newspaper article would quote Maria: “I was praying in English and in Spanish.” The journalist’s comment: The gods help those who help themselves.

My love of cliche quotes. Will never die.

I would go on to have other grand moments like that in athletics. All-American titles in college. A taste of glory.

I wanted more. I wanted that feeling.

I chased those moments wherever I could get my hands on them: relationships, academics, careers. The highs were high, and the lows were crushing. So crushing, in fact, that I would sabotage myself.

I would quit.

Find excuses.

Hide.

I would crave validation, answers, something to give me meaning and purpose.

Get really depressed.

Find Jesus.

Then say goodbye to Jesus.

What was next?

Next.

Next.

Never—now.

You don’t know how to live in the middle.

At sixteen, I didn’t know exactly what my dad meant, other than to interpret it as: You’re too emotional, Becca.

I was. I still am. Over things that others would roll their eyes at. I cry at.

It wasn’t until I read The Power of Now that I understood what my dad meant.

Now is boring.

Now is mundane.

Now is average.

Now is staring at my baggy eyes in the mirror, wishing for youth, dreading the loss of vitality.

Now is restless.

Now is too far from my goals.

Now hurts.

Now is irritating.

Now doesn’t last.

Now hates nostalgia.

Now hates fantasies.

I see versions of this in my patients, too. I think of one person who had been with me through four intense years. At one point, they said something that has stayed with me: Once I reach what I’ve wanted, my brain says it’s only downhill. And fast.

That fear of the plummet can become its own kind of suffering. I anticipate the climb. Dread the loss of the high. Fear the depths (read: rejection and failure) below.

I cannot be.

Always somewhere else.

Waiting for the next thing.

Replaying the last thing.

Trying to outrun the thing happening right now.

"The moment you recognize you are not present, you are."

This ordinary, boring, maybe beautiful little piece of life that inserted itself into my now, I tried to shoo away because I thought I was so busy living when I was really just spinning.

October 24th, 1996, exists only my memory, in a yellowed newspaper, in a buried scrapbook in my mother's basement storage room. An epheremal now.

The middle. The now. Maybe it's all meaningless, maybe that's the point. Detached from meaning, grounded to the breath. It is nothing, and yet, it is everything.

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