What I've been saying in these recent posts is more than mere empty words, I assure you. I was once assaulted by a disease that, while the doctors told me it probably wouldn’t kill me, it made me feel like it was. A couple years later, my marriage collapsed. And a year after that, my closest friend took his life. I know what it’s like to live when life feels a lot like hell.

But I also learned in the midst of it all about the power of the present.

I learned to make friendship with each and every moment.

My body felt like it was killing me, but I was not, in each breathing moment, dead. My marriage of twenty-three years fell apart and I fell into an emotional free-fall, but I was not, in each breathing moment, falling apart. My friend’s mind broke, but my mind was not, in each breathing moment, broken.

In each moment I was alive, breathing. And so long as I stayed in the moment, life came to me and even (believe it or not) I could taste the most exquisite happiness. I learned the habit of returning to the moment every time my mind pulled me into the woulda, shoulda, coulda’s of the past, or I head-tripped through fantasies about a better future.

In the present I learned to taste God and that taste of God was nothing like what I’d known of God when God was a mere idea.