The present is far from gift-wrapped.

I looked anxiously around me: the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror-and me. the true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thoughts. It is true that I had realized a long time ago that mine had escaped me. But until then I had believed that it had simply gone out of my range. For me the past was only a pensioning off: it was another way of existing, a state of vacation and inaction; each event, when it had played its part, put itself politely into a box and became an honorary event: we have so much difficulty imagining nothingness. Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be-and behind them... there is nothing.

Not, how much of my money will I give to God, but, how much of God’s money will I keep for myself?

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

[T]he present is self-sufficient, but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present — the unfolding of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the seed is as much the goal as the flower.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes;
I wonder if It weighs like Mine,
Or has an Easier size.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

When pondering how the past affected us, we rarely look for OUR effect on it. We think about what we were up against versus what we stood for. We remember what we feared but not what we dreamed. We ponder how much we were loved versus how much we loved. We think, why did all that happen to me? What did I get out of it? Where will it lead me? When perhaps we should wonder, what did I make happen? What did I give? Where will I direct myself now?

It was my moment of wondering what, in my life, had been my golden pin like Schindler's, the thing so precious to me that it never occurred to me to use it to ransom the life of someone else.

"You marked the minutes," the old man said. "But did you use them wisely? To be still? To cherish? To be grateful? To lift and be lifted?"

The answer I gave myself and the oracle was that it was to my advantage to be as I am.

I weigh the sea
I weigh the storm
I weigh a thousand stories long.
I weigh my mother's fortitude and my father's eyes
I weigh the way they look at me with pride
I weigh strength and fearless and the warrior in me.
I weigh all the pain and trauma that made me see
that I have more galaxies inside me than tragedies.
We all weigh joys and darkness and goodness and sin
you see, we are infinite within this skin we are in.
So when they ask you what you weigh
you don't need to look down at any scale.
Instead, simply tell them the truth,
tell them how you
weigh whole universes
and storms and scars and stories too.

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.