The following is an adapted reprint from the book African Zen. The chapter/meditation is entitled “A Spiritual House.”
“You cannot build a house for last year’s summer.”- Ethiopian proverb
Our expectations about what we will experience can be so different from the reality of our present experience. Just as our perceived future can defy our expectations, the perceptions of our past can thwart the present and the perceived future.
If we choose to keep living in the past over and over again, we become oblivious to the changing of “the seasons” and build our “house” on the basis of illusions. Reliving the past in our mind (that’s the only place the past can “live”) is a way to ensure suffering, to punish ourselves for missteps, mistakes and missed opportunities.
The words, “if only,” are our constant refrain when we recount events of the past, rather than ” I chose to…”. Someone once told me that when a series of unfortunate events occur in my life, one person is present in every event – me. We can take responsibility for the choices we have made, but we must also be willing to accept what we have become, the influence of those choices on our present moment of experience and being. Since we see the past as unchangeable, we become frustrated with trying to change it, and then become obsessed with our powerlessness to redo the events. Our egoic minds commit us to constant repetition of these thoughts with the hope that something will change. Obscured in all our fantasizing and recounting is the possibility of a full appreciation of our present moment. Each moment marches by as we invest our precious energy in recriminations of the past.
In the present moment, we build a house that endures all seasons, because in our spiritual house the past, present and future converge into the oneness of the universe. In our spiritual house, time is eternal, there are no mistakes, and there are no regrets. We embrace each new moment like the joy of spring, the light of summer, the fragrances of fall and the coolness of winter. We move effortlessly through the series of “right nows.” The present moment is where we live, what we experience and where all of who we are rests.