Treat Every Experience as Passing Reality

Many years ago, when I was a young woman not yet twenty, I attended classes at Marianopolis College in Montreal. The college was housed in an old nunnery, rock-walled and drafty. Up on the top floor, the fourth floor, in a corner room, a priest with a surprisingly cynical smile, the spirit of a rebel and a flair for drama taught a course which I have never forgotten. It was called, 'Man in Pursuit of Playfulness' and touched on everything from Greek myth to the plays of Jean Paul Sartre.

One of the things that Father Menke taught us was that change is constant and inevitable. He urged us to treat every experience as passing reality, moving through our lives, not something that binds us, but rather something that relentlessly presses us toward the next experience, and the next, and the one after that.

When I am struggling, or tired of something that is surrounding me (weeks of grey skies come to mind), his words offer me a positive and optimistic way forward: "Treat every experience as passing reality."

When I am in bliss and joy, loving the moments as exquisite jewels on the string of time, his words sound an admonition not to become attached to any one expression of the sacred life force within and around me: "Treat every experience as passing reality."

Some say that time is behaving differently now than it has in the years past. Some say that time is going faster now, or that it is reacting to our thoughts about it, quantum-like. Some say that 2011 will show us time going faster than ever before. Treat every experience as passing reality. It shall not last. It shall not stay. We are invited to present ourselves to the present moment and to hold our consciousness there.

Interestingly, when I am in the Now, time moves at just the right speed all along. It seems to move much faster when I project myself into the future and rush, rush, rush to that next experience, that next task, that next endeavour. It seems to lag and drag when I nostalgically linger in past doings, experiences long shadowed by years.

Treat every experience as passing reality. When I realize the full import of that imperative, I can only be in the moment. It is going, going, gone. And it will never come again.

I used to think that it would come back. As an amateur botanist, I'm forever roaming the landscape noticing what grows where. What could be more immovable than a plant for goodness sake!? It's rooted. But no, going back, the next year or two years later, the plant has sickened, or the grove is cut, or the conditions have changed completely due to flood or drought, or they've all been shaded out by fast growing competition. And a thriving community of something rare and wonderful is gone.

Those mornings, you know the ones I mean, those mornings that sing a song of such sweetness that we cannot but linger in their colours, and we have to hurry to get somewhere and we say, "Never mind, it'll come again..." But it doesn't....     not just like that, not exactly. That's why I take photographs; it's an attempt to hold that moment.

These days are intense as change comes to the world, as energies of change and becoming flood us, as the waters rise in distant places and threaten our sense of what is normal and what is expected. These days are strong in us; we ride them like surfers riding the big waves that herald a storm.

Remember to breathe. Remember to breathe deeply. Remember to love. Remember to laugh. And then, treat every experience as passing reality.