Where? When?

I watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris with my family the other night. The story (of a man on vacation in Paris with his unsympathetic fiance and her family who finds himself traveling back in time to the Paris of the 1920′s) contains some very witty dialogue and beautiful shots of Paris. For me, the best moment in the film is when the time-travelling man realizes that the true “Golden Age” of Paris (or anywhere) is in the here and now, right where we are.

Some years ago, my wife had our family take a quiz from a book about living simply. We all answered the questions pretty much the same way: the things that mattered most to us were our friends and families, the times that we were most happy were the times we were with our friends and families or engaged in doing something for others, our desires for the future all had to do with expressing and receiving expressions of love. At the end of the questions we were asked if we were living in accord with those desires. Everyone agreed: “Not so much as we would like to be!”

The film and the quiz were essentially about the same thing: finding ourselves whole in in the present tense of our lives. I confess, it’s not a new subject for me. 40 years ago I got a copy of “Be Here Now,” Ram Dass’s spiritual reference book for getting more deeply into what gives life meaning and I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

At this point, I can say that while we can all agree pretty easily that living your highest values is a good idea, it definitely takes some consecrated effort to not get distracted or derailed along the way.

It’s interesting that right now we are seeing more and more scientific studies affirming the benefits of what are traditionally thought of as religious teachings. Keeping the Golden Rule quantitatively makes for better marriages. Generosity is good for your health. Helping others makes you more contented and happy. And there is a provable relation between physical well-being and a mental sense of being whole (familydoctor.org and many other health sites cite a measurable correlation between emotional and physical health.)

“Health” and “whole” have the same etymological root (the Old English “hal”.) We feel “hale,” healthy or whole, when we feel that all is well and in its right place. Rather than search ways to humanly control that (or fantasize about living in another time) we can become aware of that rightness as a spiritual fact that we can’t ever be separated from.  It does help to know that it really is all here now and our part is simply to recognize and respond to it.