No Better Time Than.... Now

It’s amazing to think that the last time I posted was more than six years ago. Was this really the last time that I truly invested in myself? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure I’ve been busy helping others, staying busy, doing things, you know living, working… but not taking time to reflect. What’s important? What matters? Why haven’t I updated my web site, in six plus years?

Rather than trying to sort out all of the dim faded days of years past, what if I start with more recent history?

If I rewind to March 7, 2020, almost nearly four months ago in what feels like approximately a 75-year timespan, six years to the day after my last blogpost, I was in line, at a grocery store, seeing scores of customers with a panicked uneasy look at the massive food checkout lines during the day. This was days before my state, and my country declared a national emergency. My city of San Francisco was on it. It knew what was coming. But I didn’t. Really none of us did.

And yet, here we are. Now. Now arrives all of the time. In all its newness, all its glory, strangely like clockwork, with eerie predictability. Now arrives.

Rather than live in regret or rumination, I can reflect and choose to say, “how about the present?” As the old adage goes, there’s no time like it. As the improviser’s wisdom would agree whole-heartedly, now is all that we ever have. Now is everything.

Let’s pick things up right where we left off, and imagine it’s the exact timing that was needed.

When are you going to start that next big project? Sit and reflect and journal? Call your family? Slow down? Take a risk? That thing that you’ve been procrastinating, punting on, perpetually pencilling in 0r putting down the priority placement of an imaginary To-Do list that seems more of a pipe dream?

I offer you a gift. There’s no time, but now.

Mistakes as Gifts

You’ve likely seen or have heard about an infamous introduction speech at the 2014 Academy Awards.  John Travolta made a mistake.  Thank goodness!  So many moments that go well in life go unnoticed.  This occurrence generated more joy, with people messing up their own names, on purpose.  See slate.com’s Travoltify Your Name meme or the Broadway marquee for If/Then.  The world is now a slightly better place than it was prior to the blunder.  And Idina Menzel?  More people now know who she is!  When we can get over ourselves and our own mistakes, we can create a win-win-win.

Fortunately

We as human beings are pretty great about recounting stories from our past, holding on to them as inner truths to shape our current values, routines, and patterns of behavior.  We are equally, though often less consciously, conducting the same mental exercise with our future stories, or shadow stories, as Robert Poynton refers to them in his thoughtful and thought-provoking book, Everything’s an Offer.  If you are familiar with improvisation, you may know two storytelling exercises: the Story Spine and Fortunately/Unfortunately.  Recently, I’ve been thinking about their connections, combining the two of them in order to practice the art of quantum storytelling.  If we can practice the discipline of letting go of our fear-based framing of pessimistic shadow stories and swap it for the resilient spirit of a more optimistic outlook, perhaps we continuously, from the present, can alter our future selves and co-create a both peaceful and dynamic interrelated existence with a more positive collective human story. 

Myth?  Maybe.  Moral imperative?  Absolutely.  Our species’ survival may one day depend on it.