Now, now, now

📍 London, UK (Issue 210)

Somewhere beautiful and high in Sri Lanka

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for the future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “now I’ve arrived!” Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.” — Alan Watts.

Down a steep gravel track, unsigned and apparently uninhabited, I found my guest house. It was somewhere in Sri Lanka, in the hills. The red-tiled bungalow with whitewashed walls had an adorable terrace scattered with woven twine chairs and a tea table. Through swinging double doors, there were bedrooms and a kitchen, with lines of ants crossing sometimes from ceiling to floor, sometimes from room to room.

There were just two other guests, a German couple, Amadeus and Ali — and no host to be found.

Being so deep within the forest, the house got dark early, and at dusk’s gloom, the three of us shared tea.

The conversation we had that evening shook me up, and changed my world view.

Amadeus was in his 70s when I met him. A decade earlier, however, on one breezy April morning, he woke up and his left arm was not working. It hung limp by his side.

Thinking he’d had a stroke, they rushed to the hospital. The hospital was not far away in the post-Soviet East German town where they lived. After comprehensive testing, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative condition. The doctors explained gravely that slowly all his muscles would degenerate, and eventually he’d not be able to move, and then not eat, and then not breathe. This might all happen, they said, in a matter of months or, maximum, in a couple of years.

Amadeus and Ali were scared but in that moment resolved to live with an openness and calm intensity I’ve never otherwise seen.

To find a solution, they first turned to Western medicine.

All the very best European doctors said nothing would help their situation. He was diagnosed, they confirmed, the tests said so, they concurred, and that was that: condemned to live out the lab results.

Eventually, perhaps out of frustration, Amadeus and Ali visited a Chinese doctor. We can imagine an old and gloomy store, with walls lined with mysterious bottles that glint in the low light of the dark green desk lamp, under which the doctor sat rather hunched. Here, with a knowing smile, the doctor took Amadeus’s inactive arm, twisted it around a little, and — as if he had cast a spell — the arm returned to life! It was weaker than before (it hadn’t been used for months), but it worked!

The couple were thrilled.

Next, the Chinese doctor explained that Amadeus’s health wouldn’t deteriorate rapidly only (“only! … only! …” — the doctor added long pauses and repeated himself for emphasis) if Amadeus was very careful to complete a certain prescription of exercises: He was to swing his arms in a certain way twice a day, and then lift himself in and out of a chair, and so on.

Amadeus explained that these were all fine to do, but he loved dancing the tango. Could he just do more tango instead?, “you know, instead of these physio exercises?”

The Chinese doctor, pausing as if running an enormous mental calculation, said, “Do tango, tango like your life depends on it.”

So they did! And for a decade, Amadeus and Ali tango’d all over the world, competing, learning, even judging others. It’s now their passion, their calling! And Amadeus is strong and fit (age considering); although the condition had not altogether left him, he’s extremely robust.

Having gone through this experience, Amadeus carries a uniquely open perspective on the world. He receives every moment as if he’s being given an enormous gift, with a childlike wonder — it’s incredible to be close to. We went sightseeing together, visiting some temples and a school, and there was an extreme openness to their manner.

One evening in our guest house, sitting up late again sharing tea, Amadeus began to explain to me how he saw the world. I listened. He began,

“Hector, how did you feel five years ago, or a year ago?”

After a bit of probing, I explained that it didn’t feel any different to how I am right now, and the distance between me and those times seems vanishingly small, as if those past moments of ‘now’ had only just happened a second ago.

Amadeus continued (and I am paraphrasing, but the essence is accurate),

“Exactly! All of those moments of the past, they really happened in this one long ‘now’ that we are experiencing all at once, all the time.

“At some point, my left arm will stop working again, then my right, and then I’ll not be able to move, or swallow, and I’ll be older and I’ll die, and that will all be ‘Now’ too. Right now — exactly this moment! It will be fresh like this moment, expansive like this moment, simply ‘now’; right now!”

At his direction, we stood up to look at a photo hanging in the corridor: it was faded and perhaps a century old. The photo showed a busy road in Colombo. Many of the men in the photographs were walking with umbrellas. Amadeus said:

“Look at all these people, they all went to a shop to buy these umbrellas, they twizzled them around to make sure they looked good, they tested the mechanism, and all of that happened now, too. Right now! When else could it have happened? Surely not in the past — because that’s just an idea (we can’t access the past), and obviously not the future either, that’s somewhere else, impossible to reach, merely an idea; it must have happened now.”

I have since heard this insight explained in a different way.

Our experience is like standing in an aquarium, and watching through a small porthole window, a large whale swim by. First we see the nose and mouth of the whale, then a thick body with a fin, then a slim tail. The whale turns around, and swims back: first head, then body, then tail.

The idiot would reason that: ‘well, head is always followed by body, and body by tail, so therefore head causes body, and body causes tail.’

Now — of course the head doesn’t cause the tail! Absurd! It’s one fish. The whale is one happening, one arising.

Related to our own lives, we think that youth causes middle age, and middle age causes old age. Our life is just one thing. Birth is death. Middle age is youth is old age. Albert Einstein elaborated, explaining, "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Alan Watts expanded further, "The present moment is the only moment that exists, and it is eternity itself."

And Amadeus told me, under the moon hardly visible beyond the dense and loud Sri Lankan rainforest, “Now, now, now — it’s the only place we ever get to visit.”