Mama, is the future real?

One day after school, my 9-year-old daughter sat in the passenger seat and asked, “Mama, is it true that the future isn’t real?”

My heart thumped with intensity as she left me feeling speechless for the 10,000th time. 

​Where does she hear these things? I often wonder.

“You ask the most amazing questions,” I answered, letting my chest become softened by her depth. 

I spoke the words my heart offered, trusting it would all somehow make sense to her. “Yes, my sweet girl, it’s true.” 

​I told her that we think about the future as something real, but it’s actually just an idea that leads us to another moment of now. I wondered if someone had told me these things when I was a child. Or maybe I first encountered these thoughts in college while reading Ram Dass’ Be Here Now.

“All we have is now, my love.” She listened intently as I aimed to speak with brevity rather than waterfalling her with a downpour of passionate Mama philosophy. 

Then, perhaps unsurprisingly to my readers, I ventured down the Love Sermon path. It is, after all, my religion. 

On I went, waterfalling. “And in this moment of now — the only time there is — we only have one choice.”

She gazed at me with her hazel eyes calmed by our loving exchange and asked, “What do you mean?”

“Love or fear. That’s the only choice. We can choose to extend the Love that we are — because in that moment we remember that Love is who we are — or we can reach out for Love in fear, because we forgot that Love is who we are,” I told her in my typical Love Evangelist way. She was used to it by now and she quickly absorbed what she felt, hearing these words. 

In the week that followed, I noticed how our conversation sweetened my life. When I felt annoyed by somebody honking at me when I was clearly following the rules of the road, I didn’t react from upset. Instead, my heart felt compassion for this man, living in the speed and gruel of a hurried society, which might have led him to behave this way. 

Was he calling for Love? I made up that he was. It’s all a dream and it’s all made up, this story we now write, called Life. So as he drove by me in haste, I blew him and his wife a kiss. Alright I’ll admit, the air-kiss was topped with a smidge of snark. 

I am grateful for the moments when I choose Love. I am also grateful, however unpleasant they usually are, for the moments when I choose to react based in fear. These motivate me to, next time, choose Love instead. 

It just feels better.​

Love feels better.

Right now.

And right now.

​The only time there is…

​I am grateful for my daughter. Children are the original gurus. Thank goodness, we all have a child inside.