A Potent Now

The Potency of the Present

Once we abandon the belief that there is a more spiritually useful moment than the one we are in, we have embraced our life and infused it with the energy for awakening.

- Rodney Smith, "Undivided Mind"



It is very hard to view a single moment in life as spiritually useful. Walking to the break room to get a cup of coffee seems so completely unspiritual. Even harder to accept is that a series of mundane moments spent in a vanilla box building doing office work is spiritually useful.

How can the acts of opening the door to the break room, finding my cup, pouring the coffee replacing the carafe on the heating element, walking out of the room, closing the door and returning to my office mean anything? But any sense that these acts are just killing time with insignificant matters isn’t true.

The coffee I use is a decaffeinated blend. I buy that because my cardiologist has told me that caffeine can cause my coronary arteries to spasm. The brand of coffee is Biggby’s Best. I prefer Starbucks blend but I buy Biggby because it is a local company and the owner is a friend to me. More importantly his son is a very dear friend to my son.


Each time I get up I am getting exercise and I sorely need that. This winter more than any other in my life I have been a couch slug and the weight has just piled on. The motion moves my blood and the blood moving makes my mind clear. The coffee maker is not mine and so I owe thanks to the person who brought it in, our clerical person here. She doesn’t even drink coffee. Her brining the coffee maker in is an act of unwarranted kindness.

On the way to and from the coffee pot I may run into someone who is suffering or fretting or otherwise in need of help or affirmation. By either Christian or Buddhist tradition I have to acknowledge them and offer something. I should do it if can help or perhaps lighten their emotional burden in any manner even if it is just by listening. The Lutherans go with “Into pain and suffering you are born…” and the Buddhists go with suffering as being the most basic of the elements of human experience. We are charged in either faith with working toward the elimination of suffering.

Being aware of the meaning of each step I take this morning, each step we take this morning, really does infuse our life with a sense of awakening albeit very small and slight. Sometimes that is all you get. Appreciating the complexities of what it took to put me in this place with a cup of hot dirty brown water in hand talking about someone’s grandson who is struggling, well this is embracing life. It is enough.