We've Never Been Here Before

We’re all arriving at this moment in time together.

None of us have ever been here before, which means that anything is possible.

None of us is an expert about this moment or the moments that lay ahead, because there is no way to know for sure what lay ahead.

We like to pretend we know; we like to act as if we know, we like to rest in the feeling of security that our plans give us. But, the trick in all of this is that we have no idea what’s going to happen next. The present and the future are both up for grabs and no matter how much we think we have control over the way events unfold, life has a tendency to blindside us with any number of small and large unexpected events that remind us that we’re at the mercy of the unforeseen.

We cannot account for or even factor in the unexpected. We prefer to forge ahead regardless of the surprise(s) that may be around the next corner.

It certainly keeps life interesting and exciting to not know what’s next. But it also can work against the best laid plans. We cannot live without plans and simply drift around wherever life wants to takes us. Nor can we be too attached to any plans we do have.

There must be happy medium in here somewhere. If change is the only constant—the only thing we can count on—how do we navigate from the past to the present to the future?

By staying focused as much as possible on the moment. Receiving it as the gift that it is, because it, like all the other moments, will soon be gone. Forever. 

Don’t you find it fascinating that we are all equalized by the very common experience of having never been here before?

It‘s new for all of us.

No one has been able to jump ahead and report back on the future.

No, we’re all entering it together, at the exact same time.

This is profound when you think about it. Funny, how most of us have never even considered this as the most common bond that we all share. It’s universal and cuts across times zones, cultures, ethnicities, religions, age, sex, and locates us all in the same moment in time, on the edge of the next moment and the next. We’re all moving forward together without anything to prepare us for what’s ahead.

We’re so busy acting as if we know what we’re doing all the time, that we’ve forgotten how vulnerable we all are in this. It’s as if we forgotten the most fundamental truth about existence, and because we’ve buried it, like some deep, dark secret, we’re all walking around in the dark in unknown, foreign territory, simply through the act of being alive.

Each moment is always new, never like the last, and forever filled with the potential for change.

We buzz right through the moments as if we got plenty to spare, tossing them aside here and there, like waste, never realizing that they cannot be gathered up again. Instead of approaching each moment as if it were a new and precious gift, we recycle our assumptions and concepts and projections over and over again, missing what’s right in front of us—cluttering the present with the past. In doing this, we don’t notice how stale the air has gotten or how dead we feel as we skim the surface of life, ignoring the birth that is happening within and around us each and every moment. 

Not to worry, because right now, you have another chance.

As you finish reading this piece and before you go on to the next activity, I’d like you to stop, take a breath, and remember that you and everyone around you have never been here before. This moment is newborn, breathing with new life and unseen possibilities.

What will you do with this gift?