“Begin anywhere
Walking on the earth is a miracle!
Each step reveals the wondrous.”
Dharmakaya

Touching the moment: it sounds so simple, and yet it can be so challenging! Often we come to the page burdened by what’s already past or anticipating what might happen. We carry a sense of failure or regret about a writing session that didn’t go well to our next go round and put ourselves under pressure to accomplish something more, something better. Or we fantasize about flying high and writing something spectacular. And between regret about the past and leaning toward the future, the present moment disappears, lost forever.

But that moment is everything: it contains everything. All the words we may ever write from this day forward are waiting for us right now. I like to think of them as little angels of opportunity flickering and fluttering around us, delicately summoning our attention among all the distractions that can call us away from the words hovering and waiting for us to discover them and reveal them to the rest of the world.

Think about it: Everything Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Cather or Woolf ever wrote once existed only as disembodied ideas and unconnected words just floating out in the universe, waiting to be called to life and crafted into meaning. And the tools they had at their command and the words that danced at their behest are the very same ones that we have available to us. What could be more exciting? There’s nothing to weigh us down, nothing to stop us from writing the best sentence we’ve ever written, nothing to keep us from allowing ourselves to arrive at a moment of transcendent craft we’ve never experienced.

So right now, let’s decide to stay in the now. Let’s approach the page openly, with fresh eyes — and wait, simply wait, for whatever comes next. Write on!