The Nowness of Now

There is no substitute for the nowness of now. I realize that sounds like a rejected U2 lyric, or a line from an off-brand Yoda T-shirt, but it’s hard to talk about the experience of time. One of the odd luxuries of being alive is this feeling of currency: that each of us, however humble, represents breaking news 13 billion years in the making. The whole huge bounty of the past, every dinosaur fight and asteroid blast and flood and war and ice age and invention and mistake, has led to this particular second — to me sitting here at my desk eating a peanut butter chocolate protein bar, worrying that my pants are too tight, writing these words about the nature of existence. No bush has ever rustled precisely the way the bush is rustling outside my window right now. No one has ever inhaled exactly the bouquet of fresh molecules that you just inhaled, this very moment, into your unique wet lungs.

From “New Sentences” by Sam Anderson for the New York Times; Image by Alex Perez 

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