Between

I am constantly between what was and what is about to be. My world, and I, are in constant change. I am beginning to wonder if there is anything in the between. Or maybe it is everything. So it sometimes seems.

I am constantly reminded of what has been. I spent a few days at my cabin, and I was surrounded by reminders of my past experiences, especially all those aspects of my cabin I have built. I am often reminded of past experiences, all of which can lure me into thinking of what has been. I have friends who populate conversation with remembrances of what they have done, of what happened to them. They quickly move from now to then, a point in the past.

For me the future often has a similar distracting attraction. Promises of things to come, threats of how things may not turn out to my liking routinely populate my thinking mind. The past invites me to think of past joys and regrets, the future tells me of a panorama of hopes and fears.

Still, all I really have exists between the past and future. Apart from memories, I can really know little of what has been. I cannot yet know what has yet to be. I am between, and that is all my mind can truly gasp and absorb. That same mind yearns so much to dwell on memories of the past and to anticipate what is about to become.

If, out of habit, I allow my mind to be drawn to the past or future, I am likely to miss out on what is happening right now. I am living between, and so is the world. Nothing exists any longer as it once was, and nothing has yet become what it is about to be. No activity or fabrication of my mind can change that. I can only know what is between.

I am beginning to think that what is between, between past and future, is emptiness. I think that time and space between past and future is emptiness. There is no true now. Everything is between, in a state of becoming. To enter into now is to enter into emptiness. Now is the realm of infinite possibility.

Focusing on now can be a small and subtle experience of emptiness. Between past and future there is only a realm of becoming. When I experience what it feels like to be between, I experience a small door of openness to what is yet to be and a small trace of what has been. That is as close as I typically get to experiencing becoming.

My between is not so much past or present or future. It is the emptiness of becoming.