“This is the work of compassion: to embrace everything clearly without imposing who we are and without losing who we are.”  —Mark Nepo

“All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present, ” wrote the philosopher Eckhart Tolle.

” Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.” 

Day by day, I am working on issues relating to fear, resentment, and worry. The great spiritual gurus are of a mind. Live in the present, fear and anger and worry live in the past and the future.

The great gurus inspire me, but they also puzzle me.

Why do they ask us to shed the feelings we are born with and find it so hard to shed? If I can find happiness and peace in the present, why does my mind so often go backward and into the future to find things to seethe over and things to fear?

I see that this is the point of spirituality. Nobody said it would be easy to find compassion and the ability to live in the now. It’s the struggle that matters, not the resolution.

I decided some years ago to give up on being a martyr, a person who chooses suffering over hope, a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle, a great or constant sufferer.

So a martyr can be a hero or a self-pitying victim. There are different ways to be a martyr, but I think peace came when I learned not to be a martyr to my own life. Not to look back on all the wrongs I suffered, or to look ahead to all the things I fear.

I get this spiritual idea of too much past and future, not enough present. A friend of mine is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he messages me almost every day of his escalating discovery of life.

I will not be a martyr to my cancer, he says, I know I will suffer, but I didn’t think I would find so much joy in each day. Yesterday, he said, he discovered that water was not blue, but clear. He never noticed that he said.

He saw it was beautiful; he says that each morning he discovers a new and beautiful thing that he did not see before. In one ironic way, he said, his cancer was a gift. He was seeing the world now, he said, his eyes were wide open.

He shames me sometimes with his spirit. This morning, I looked up at some beautiful beads hanging on a string and dangling in the sunlight from the rearview mirror of my car.

“Wow,” I said the Maria, “those beads are beautiful. How long have they been hanging up there on the mirror.” She laughed and turned to look at me as if she wanted to see if I was joking.

“They’ve been there for ten years,” she said, “on this car and the one before it.” I was astonished. I could not remember seeing them. They were 10 inches from my nose. I was embarrassed.

“You gave me those beads,” she said, “you got them from a peddler in Brooklyn and gave them to me as a gift. I put them on a string and hung them in your car as a remembrance of our love.” She wasn’t angry; she laughed, she’ s  used to my distractedness and inability to see the things in front of my nose. I like to call it Dyslexia, but she calls it something else.

Fortunately for me, she has a sense of humor.

But I do grasp the lessons in these two anecdotes, my friend and mine. They echo Tolle’s prescription for peace. It is a powerful thing for me to try to understand what it is I see and what it is I don’t see.

I think one reason I love photography so much is it helps me to see the world anew. And to remind myself to have a presence in my life, to see what is right in front of me, and not drift to the past or the future.