How Wonderful The Gift Of Life Seems 

Can you speak or write in the absolute now, or is the now gone in the time it takes for the now to hit your senses and wind its way up our nerves into our brains and then for us to speak or write it on a page?      

Can we overlook the micro-moments between perception and recording on the brain or on paper?     

In this near to now my dog licks his black paw stretched out on the bed. The light streams in a side window into this darkened room onto this notebook page and a dove outside calls. Those nearly nows are receding as my pen moves on the page trying to pin them down.     

The dove still calls. The air filter hums almost silently in this allergy season.     

Now there’s the sound of a page turning as I write more in the nearly now. It is close to quiet in this nearly now. A top drawer in this old brown wooden desk is half open. There is a humming in my ears. I have a taste of tinnitus.      

Here the nearly now is mostly still. Some might call it boring. So busy am I in recording that my thoughts are rare. My body feels a little tired. My sad bad knees are both aching. Should I be sorry this nearly now is not more dramatic?      

Put down your cell phones, kids, and enjoy the silence. Learn to muse and think on your own.    No bombs are falling outside but I know they are falling elsewhere. I hear the quite whir of a plane overheard. Rain is falling, a slow rain outside that my dog and I don’t hear, or maybe Coco dog hears.      

It’s been peaceful to settle into this nearly now. I am content, and now I am thinking in this nearly now, of a thought I had yesterday.     

Is that cheating?     

Is that thought as much of the now as the tinnitus in my ears? You may disagree if you are here with me in the nearly now at a later date.     

Yesterday’s thought is about the story of life’s beginning. I learned in school that life began with the mixing of chemicals in a warm body of water. The constant stirring in currents of the chemicals finally led to life. Perhaps it was a virus kind of life since a virus sits on the edge of life and nonlife.     

 But what if life bloomed in more than one place, here on this planet or elsewhere? What if life had multiple origins? Maybe there are aliens out there and distant planets we cannot travel to in multiple lifetimes. I am thinking of this in the nearly now. Any memory pulled from the past as thought is now in the nearly now.      

And when I am thinking in the nearly now, am I not also thinking a bit in the future in a yearning for the future?     

I’m thinking I may publish this rambling on the nearly now in the future. It is the possibility of sharing my thoughts with others that leads me to write them down. Nearly now thoughts of the future are pulling me forward.    

So perhaps no divides exist between the past, the nearly now, and the future. Time, as the old metaphor said, is a flowing river and cannot be divided.     

My hope is that some souls in the future will read this and the ideas will live again rolling through their nearly nows, and I will kind of live again.    

 It has stopped raining. My spouse is starting to move about, getting ready to check on the backyard garden. I give my love a quick kiss as she heads out the back door. I may feel differently tomorrow—what with the terrible calls coming out of the wider world—but how wonderful the gift of life seems in this nearly now.