“This once, but never again,” we hear a curse in the moment. And we toil at loud things to ring out through the ages, and at monuments to stand the test of time. But there is no test. From silence we come and to silence we return, along with our names and all we have named.
So we imagine our gods eternal, as we fail to perceive the divine in the moment. We argue for truths universal, as the relative slips the grasp of our minds. We close our eyes to the here and now and retreat into dreams of heavens. This desertion of life is called wisdom and faith by many!
We assume God so weak as to need to be eternal, truth so poor as to have to be universal, and heaven so distant as to be other than life. We assume that, like all else, these would burn away if placed in the furnace of time. And we don’t allow for the possibility that they may be the very spark of the present. What if it is a blessing that the moment carries?
“This once and never again… But forever!”
May we bless the moment back,
Simeon
“In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Suggested Reading
The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel
What if eternity does not stand beyond time, but opens within it? In The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel teaches us to enter time as a sanctuary, where the fleeting moment is not an obstacle to the sacred but its very dwelling place.
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Nietzsche’s Deepest Idea Will Change Your Life
Eternal recurrence is the permanent repetition of your impermanent life. All your anxieties and unresolved conflicts, all disappointments, regrets, embarrassments, and suffering; all this mixed with your joys, pleasures, and triumphs, every ecstasy, every agony, and every dull, trivial, wasted hour… All of this again and again, forever. It is what Nietzsche called “the heaviest burden”, and he thought that to be able to say “YES” to it is the highest achievement of an individual.
Strikingly said, Simeon. -- yes, 'tis so. Each instant unfolding from its precursor and into its successor, Always utterly now flowing as one. Impermanence paradoxically always here now. NOW is All. Inherently sacred.
As you almost say, 'May we bless this moment ...' for NOW is forever and neither forward nor back ♾️ ....