Maturity

Any book on wisdom will tell us;  

'be in the present'

'it's the 'here and now'

'all you have is the present moment'

As with any quote or cliche, we know everything is nuanced...contextual...so also this.  There is no absolute truth. 

In the absolute, a "here and now" "be in the present" can strip life of depth and meaning. 

It is not about letting go of ones past or ones future, it's about the ability to hold both in each present moment.

Every thing that makes us what we are today is from our past, from the experiences we have, the connections we make, the meaning we've derived, the stories we hold....... to let go of all that would be to deprive ourselves of a lot that matters.

The future matters.. isn't everything I do or learn or teach or be also a step into the future...doesn't it hold my dreams. My dreams that took birth in my past, have brought me to my present and hold hope and trust and faith into the future, my next moments....

Can we expand the present moment to hold the past, the present and the future.

That is what enriches and empowers one to love life.

In this context, a write up on maturity by well known poet David Whyte, resonated:

"MATURITY is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past, the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur.

Immaturity is shown by making false choices: living only in the past, or only in the present, or only in the future, or even, living only two out of the three.

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.

Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.

Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur."