THE long weekends this month have given me time to pause and savor the present moment. Hmmm. Isn’t that the power of now? I should connect the book with reality to help me understand what it’s all about.
In Eckhart Tolle’s introduction to his “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment,” he wrote:
“The pause symbol (he inserts that symbol here) after certain passages is a suggestion that you may want to stop reading for a moment, become still, and feel and experience the truth of what has just been said. There may be other places in the text where you will do this naturally and spontaneously.”
Whenever I see that pause symbol, though, I know it’s time to read Mark Manson’s “Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope,” hoping Manson could help me understand “The Power of Now.”
In addition to the two books, I’m also reading Haruki Murakami’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.”
A memoir requires looking back to the past, “The Power of Now” focuses on the present, and any book about hope looks forward to the future. No wonder I’m confused. And it doesn’t help that I’m listening to Garbage, one of the bands I loved way back in the ‘90s—too many memories. That’s why I now prefer electronic dance music—unfamiliar music, no memories attached.
If only I can truly practice the power of now, then Garbage’s songs will stop evoking past memories. Say, if their “The World is Not Enough” is playing, I won’t connect it with James Bond. Wait, isn’t that called amnesia?
Murakami writes about simplifying his life to help him focus on writing, so, it’s kind of Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.”
Murakami and his wife used to own a bar, and he recalls this in his memoir: “After I closed the bar and began my life as a novelist, the first thing we—and by we I mean my wife and I—did was completely revamp our lifestyle. We decided we’d go to bed soon after it got dark, and wake up with the sun. To our minds this was natural, the kind of life respectable people lived. We’d closed the club, so we also decided that from now on we’d meet with only the people we wanted to see and, as much as possible, get by not seeing those we didn’t. We felt that, for a time at least, we could allow ourselves this modest indulgence.”
He didn’t exactly ask, Does it spark joy?, but the question somehow hovers over the way he has lived, most probably because he’s also Japanese, like Kondo.
The yes or no answer to Kondo’s most precious question should be the deciding factor for choices and decisions. She even discourages people from having background music while doing their spring cleaning, to help them feel the joy—or its absence—in each item. So, there are times when I prefer silence while staring at the screen, trying to write this column. But there’s noise during the day that’s better off overpowered by EDM.
