One time.
When you say “One time,” in a story, you mean a time that happened in the past, but one you are still living in, living at that very moment. How often have you felt it: a whiff of patchouley, the sight of someone wearing a yellow scarf, the sound of Amy Ray singing “Love’s Discovery”–and suddenly you are gone, out of the present, backward in time, some other place, miles away, how easy it is to be transported, how slight our connection to our body is as an entity in space.
The fast is permanent “one time,” because you are disconnected from the physical network of food and exchange of mass and matter that connects all the physical universe. You are a mere ghost, hovering in it, breathing the air in and out, not partaking, but affecting it nonetheless with your karmic actions, even, if you think about it, with your breathing.
This morning, the same thick rain I dreamed about yesterday. Then the sun came up and everything was warm and gold. By now the sun’s light has whitened as it has been covered by thin clouds. A cool breeze ruffles through the trees.
Three moods in one day.
So it is all right for me to feel glorious, glum, and content, one after the other, sometimes all at once.
Why am I always reaching? For the next thing and the next thing?
Isn’t this one moment all I have?
But, “This one time…”
And I don’t after all, believe, that this life is the only life I have. Not just that there was a life before this one and a life after this one and maybe another one after that and another one after that. No, that part’s just scripture, whether it’s the Geeta that talks about it in terms of reincarnation or the Quran or Bible that talk about it in terms of afterlife.
No what I mean is a multiple, million possibilities of life happening right now. The me who woke up late and didn’t fast today. The me who decided not to move to Oberlin after all. The me who never went to New York. The me who didn’t switch his major in college and continued to study politics and went on to go to law school.
Where did all those Kazims end up? Are they happy? Though I am content with my life at the present moment and wish for no other, I supremely hope that no matter what choices I made I would still have found happiness.
And if this is the case, does that mean our happiness does not depend on our physical condition or our temporary state of well being; that it comes from another source?
I know this much: I can only live my own life, live it truly, try always to make “one time” now. Should all the multiple possibilities, all the different paths, be this one, my one life, at this moment?
Olga Broumas wrote that some sects of Orthodox Jews teach that the only sin is an act of divided intention.
Similarly in yoga practice you are trying to learn to see things as they really are, free of your past preconceptions.
In Islam it is intention, even more than action, that determines the ‘karma,’ or fatal effect, of any given action.
Our tendency to live in terms of “One time,” that is, distant from our present condition, always thinking about something else, either looking backward, or looking forward, may have some relationship to the purely animal fear of being alarmingly present in the corporeal body.
Because to be really present in the body, to breathe in it, to use it, to stretch it and feel it, and not just once, but over the course of weeks or months or years, to feel it age, to know its character, is to know: that the body dies.
To be in hunger. To look at everything like you have never seen it before. To speak to people like you have never tried to speak. To move the body without inflow of energy, to try in the late afternoon, as you deplete and deplete, to do physical things: is to know how the body can fail.
And how it lives through that failure.
Walking through my house in the early evening, like a ghost, picking up my cat and kissing him on the head, hanging a jacket on the hook. The body that doesn’t even know it is moving.
You get the feeling then at that moment, light outside dimming to rich blue, that the body is not really you, but also that it is you, and more.
I was running this morning in the darkness again. I came to place where the streetlights were out, the patch of darkness where before I had thought about death. I looked down at the street where I had seen the streaks of tar that came to resemble Arabic letters. I looked more carefully at it. In fact, there curled up in the streaks of the tar, one of the workers must have used to dispenser, because there was writing in English.
In the pre-dawn, running before hunger, I read: “one time.”
My “one time” is now. Right now. My body is alive. And singing.