Now is now. That’s what he always tells me. There is nothing but now and I try to hold on to that. The past is gone, the future hasn’t happened yet. This, right here, is all there is.
Nic wrote Tweak when he was…. I think he must have been only in his early 20s. At that young age, he discovered truths that the greatest writers and philosophers taught. I’ve been working on a book about a man named Jarvis Masters, who’s a death-row prisoner in California, who became a Buddhist. He told a Buddhist story he learned that’s helped me in my life. A man is in the forest when he comes across a group of tigers, who begin chasing him. He gets to the edge of a cliff. The tigers are coming, so he grabs onto a vine and climbs over the edge, holding on. He looks down and sees that there are tigers waiting below him, too. He hears a noise and looks up and sees a mouse gnawing at the vine to which he clings. Then he looks directly in front of him and sees a bush with beautiful red strawberries. He looks down at the waiting tigers, and then up at the tigers above and, below them, a mouse gnawing at the vine. He reaches out and plucks a strawberry and pops it into his mouth. It tastes amazing.
We all live like that – tigers above, tigers below, and a mouse gnawing. We can spend all our time worrying about those or look in front of us, which is the present. If we do, we can see the strawberries and taste them.
Nicole Jeanne and 17 other people liked this
