Life is not TiVo™

If you watch TV, no doubt you will have experienced the situation of watching your favourite television show and the phone rings or the microwave pings. You get up to attend to this interruption and of course, miss several minutes of the show. To alleviate us from this tragedy, a few years ago some clever people invented TiVo which allows you to pause and replay live television – just hit the red button when the phone rings, hit it again upon your return and you won’t have missed a second. Since then, devices like this are a common fixture in many households. *

Reality, on the other hand, cannot be paused or replayed; it moves on relentlessly, with or without us, day by day, second by second, moment by moment. We can choose whether we want to be a part of it or hang back and let it drift passed us. Either way, reality isn’t gonna stop and wait for us to catch up.

Check this out: our life, our reality, our experience is composed of literally millions of tiny moments every second, and every one of those moments is unique. When it’s gone, it’s gone. We will never, ever experience a moment like the one that just flew past. This is why life is so fascinating – it is constantly changing, constantly unique, constantly beautiful. Life is the ultimate reality show – you are immersed in it 24/7 and you can’t turn it off, you can’t pause it, you certainly can’t replay it. Blink and you’ve missed a bit. Permanently.

Meditation helps us to see those moments, to experience life fully. When we sit on the cushion, we begin to notice reality exactly as it is, right now. No television, no phone, no internet, no conversation, nothing. Nothing! And of course, everything. Everything comes flooding in and reality hits us upside our head big time; we experience reality so fully, so completely that it overwhelms us, overwhelms us to the point where that itch on our nose becomes the most important thing in the world, or moving our aching foot dominates our thoughts, or the silence becomes so deafening that we scream out for the bell to sound. Reality is nothing. What we call something is just our experience, our interpretation, of nothing. Reality is just a moment, this moment, this unique moment, this beautiful moment.

Don’t blink!


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* A couple of years ago, I bought one to replace our ageing video recorder. In all that time, I have recorded precisely one television program, and even that I managed to bugger up!