The Moment is Now

The first weekends of fall slip away quickly and without much fanfare. Soon we'll be leaving work in the dark and missing the summer. The moment there's the first chill in the air, we'll forget how miserably hot and humid the summer was, how we complained and thought it would never end, how we yearned for autumn. We are, at times, discontented creatures with abridged memories. For myself, staying in the moment is hard - I prefer the soft haze of imagination to the sharp corners of reality and although there's absolutely no good reason for it, I can already feel the familiar, free floating autumn melancholy tugging at me.

When we used to go to the State Fair regularly, this was a time of carmel apples and cotton candy, of neon lights and coarse voiced carnies. We would spend an entire evening strolling the grounds, stopping at every booth and watching the parade of fair goers on the midway. It was romantic in a moonlight and sawdust in your veins kind of way, provided you didn't mind the stable smells and the crowds and the noise. But at some point, the fair changed and became dirty and overpriced and almost exploitative and we stopped attending - we grew out of the romance and magic and began to see what lay behind it. Later I was to wonder did the fair actually change or did we but it seemed a useless question by then, too sad to dwell on and too far in the past to remember.

I routinely remind and promise myself to stay in the day, to live just one day at a time and stop trying to go back or push ahead. It's a survival strategy that works for the most part despite all the things that work against it - my age, the unsolicited long term planning advice I hear, the uncertain, unknown future, and the almost here autumn.

We're all on our way to somewhere else, I suppose, and this time of the year reminds me of what an impermanent and unpredictable world we all share. It's not wise to stay too long at the fair. The moment is now and you're right on time.