“I Wish The Present Was A Little Longer”

It’s the Sunday of my first week in Monteverde, Costa Rica. The land of the free-spoken, minded, and willed. It is a place dense in life of every form. Every hair on my arm is standing up as I am sitting on a porch swing writing this. I’m watching a sunshower at almost sunset. In this moment of perfection for me, I still feel my throat itch from probing thoughts. 

“Living in the present” is encouraged so often with such little instruction. Conceptually, it’s fully absorbing what’s going on right at the second that you are experiencing it. But then if you are thinking about what’s happening are you really mindlessly letting the feeling of the moment overcome you? Or are we as people too conscious to live in that sweet abandonment of time and space?

I flew today for the first time in my life. I was attached to a harness being propelled across a zipline. Shelby was in front of me. The moment before she glided along the line, she looked back, her long eyelashes beaded by rain, she sighed and said “I wish the present was a little longer.” Every cell in my body exploded from witnessing my favorite human capability- the clear and beautiful articulation of an impossible-to-understand feeling. 

Then it was my time to fly. I was on my stomach, my arms outstretched, my breath suspended with my body, the trees passing underneath me. I was fucking flying. I landed and my face was wrapped in moisture from passing through the clouds. Shelby stood in front of me and we shared a recognizable look of “holy shit,” a look at the end of fleeting euphoria. “That was amazing,” I said breathlessly. “It was,” she said her face draping with melancholy. That present and that flight were over. We were so quickly swept into the next present as we always are and always will be for the rest of our lives. The soldiers of time and the excavators looking for that deep feeling of an entirely realized moment, which is as easy to grip as sand. 

Let’s say time stopped and we could unwrap the present fully: breathe in its scent, feel its mist, see every line in every leaf. We’d know everything about the moment. Instead, there’s a frantic desire to tame that instant in our minds. That hysteria is the core of it. The always not getting everything, the feeling that there’s a little that slipped through. That’s the beauty of the present as it folds and tucks into the past to become a sweet, unfinished memory. That’s what fuels my desire for more of every part of life.