Have you ever noticed that once you discover a new word or concept, suddenly you find it all over the place? It’s as if it’s trying to prove its importance, or to cement itself into your memory, or perhaps even to mock your former ignorance of it. In any event, this sudden commonness of a previously unknown thing has happened time and again, and not just to me. I’ve heard others remark on this phenomenon, too.
It happened to me again just a few weeks ago. In the course of my work, I came across the word TOLLE. I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up. It was a reference to Eckhart Tolle, an author of spiritual self-help books. Tolle seemed to be fairly well known, but not quite a household name. I had no choice but to remove the word, but it took a lot of work. That’s probably why I remember it so well. I might have been a little annoyed with Eckhart Tolle.
A few days later, I was reading a Wikipedia article about a different person. That person turned out to be an adherent of Eckhart Tolle’s philosophies. Later, I was reading an article about meditation in Rhode Island Monthly, and whose name should come up again but Eckhart Tolle’s? Then yesterday I found his name in my very own Inspiration Notebook. I had cut-and-pasted an Eckhart Tolle quote into my book without taking note of the name.
So, for anyone else who had never heard of Eckhart Tolle, he’s the guy who said this:
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. And that’s a revelation for some people: to realize that your life is only ever now.
I haven’t studied up on him, so I’m certainly not advocating him or his philosophies as a whole. However, the quote above does speak to me. I believe that the Now is all we have. For me, and perhaps also for you, the Now now includes a new name.
