‘When was the best time of your life, the happiest so far?’ A new acquaintance is throwing a games afternoon one Sunday, and it’s a great icebreaker question.
The joke (on me) – I thought we were playing Pictionary. Oh, for a breezy and original answer! Being third in the circle, going anticlockwise, I’m panicking so hard I’m oblivious to the ingenuity of the two people ahead of me, clearly smart under pressure. For all I know, when I hear myself mumbling something honest but unimaginative about ‘my thirties, meeting my partner, our young family’, I’m parroting the stranger to my left.
I’ve always said, if I were granted three wishes, humanitarian heroics aside, I’d ask to be funny … Not today! But at least the spotlight jumps to the woman sitting on my right, whom I have met before. She’s speaking now, and I settle in.
My generous host has drawn a bigger crowd than she’d anticipated, and while there’s food and wine a-plenty, once the round is complete, it’s the free play of conversation that prevails over organised games …
We get up, fill our plates and glasses, move around the room, and I find myself sitting next to her, our emcee; or she to me. We warm to each other in deeper chat. ‘You know,’ I say with sudden rose-coloured inspiration, ‘the real response to your big question – the best and happiest time of my life – is now. Because it’s all we have.’ I pause, mining my own words for meaning. ‘The only time we have is now.’ And my friend-in-the-making weighs it up, smiles, affirms: ‘I like it.’
I like it too. It is the truth for me.
In its purest form, the proposition is hardly new. Take its several expressions in history and contemporary spiritual and psychological literature … An 18th-century French Jesuit priest, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, coined the term The Sacrament of the Present Moment as the title of a book he wrote about finding God in his everyday experience. The approach was revisited in the 20th century by an Anglican woman writer and mystic, Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941). And at the turn of this, our 21st century, the bestselling The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, blending Eastern and Western traditions, popularised such mindful living, enabling millions to apply it in practice.
But that’s not quite what I mean. I’ve always been a big picture person rather than focusing on the minutiae of life.
Agreed, we can’t do much about the past, unless it’s to take steps to try and reconcile with someone we’ve fallen out with or are estranged from. And the future does evolve out of the sum of present moments, though personally I think there’s value in forward planning. If this has God in stitches, I believe s/he gave me a brain capable of stewarding my time and is curious how I’m using both mind and years.
For me, it’s not just about being fully present in every second and minute of life’s pilgrimage, though that’s a fine habit that contributes to my purpose. It’s seizing the decade as well as the day.
Which is why, after a few life events: the unexpected death of our 18-year-old daughter; my husband’s run-in with cancer; and, despite my passion for the role, incipient burnout in my mental health work; we felt as one. Having first found the islands a few months after our big bereavement, experienced deep peace in nature and a welcome among a contented local community, instead of chasing every last buck, we would live simply in the Azores.
Renovating the house we bought, after selling up in the UK, is a metaphor for our lives here – we’re doing much of the work on it ourselves and learning so many new skills is an achievement and a joy. My life partner, whose element is the ocean, swims out beyond the lava rock wall of the natural pools near our home; I prefer the more sheltered waters within. He scuba dives; fishes from the stone pier. I sit nearby on the harbour wall, read; and my writing – I’ve set up a temporary desk in a spare bedroom, with a view of the Atlantic horizon – is coming on.
So, the past being gone, and the future marching to meet us with a vigour all its own?
What’s inside me, unopened – I’m doing it now.