Be Here Now

The snow had been falling for at least half an hour when I turned up the valley by Orchard Common.  My mind had been running over any number of mundane matters, from the motorbikes at Three Shires Head to what I was having for dinner that night.  Suddenly I noticed that the only footsteps remaining on the path ahead of me were of the sheep who were out braving the weather too, and I mentally paused and thought, ‘Look at the world, now.’

Various religions, such as Buddhism and Sufism, have advocated the idea of ‘living in the present moment’; the hippies turned it into a maxim to ‘be here now’; it’s what has led the current trend for ‘mindfulness’.  Part of it is to do with letting go of the past and not worrying about the future, and part of it is to do with noticing what you are experiencing at that precise moment with all your senses.  I consciously chose to do this as I realised something magical was taking place.

Snow was falling in thick chunks from a grey sky.  It tumbled heavily without being driven by any wind, and fell silently, relentlessly.  The track I was following was an almost unblemished white channel; a narrow beck ran to my right past broken stone walls; higher up beside me a farmhouse loomed in grey and white; diminutive trees appeared as ghosts of themselves.  There was no sound but the trickle of water in the stream and crisp crunch of the fresh snow beneath my boots.  The falling snow formed a veil between me and the world, making everything seem like it was in motion, scrolling past like a spool of film.  I felt distanced from the world as all physical referents dissolved into the swirling whiteness and my sense of self disappeared into it to.  It was a pure sensation of simply existing.

I’ve written about transcendence and ekstatis (Greek, meaning ‘standing outside [oneself]’, from which we get ‘ecstasy’) before, how I look for those moments and how they almost become the main goal of any walk.  This was one of those moments.  I was there, then.