What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
What would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
—Adrienne Rich, from “Dreams Before Waking”
I remember speaking with the owner of a home care agency whose job included helping adult children convince their ailing parents to hire some outside help. Not an easy task, those conversations in which parent and child experience role reversal and the child becomes the heavy. After all, it is hard to admit you’re no longer steady on your feet or that you really shouldn’t be driving. And doesn’t starting long-term care mean the beginning of the end? Isn’t it all downhill from here?
The agency owner had what I thought was a brilliant response to all that: “This is just for now,” she would tell her would-be client. “Who’s to say that with a little help your mom won’t get stronger and become better able to take care of herself once again? And preventing a fall actually means getting to stay in your own home longer.” In other words, not an end, but a beginning.
I don’t think you have to be an aging parent or the child of one to benefit from this outlook. Whatever one’s circumstance, whatever the state of the world—this is just for now. It feels like a corollary to the Buddhist teaching to stay in the present, to stay in the now: Yes, live in the now, but go gently on yourself, knowing that the now is just for now and it’s over pretty quickly.
For many, the now right now feels full of despair. Some of that despair comes from feeling stuck—when, in fact, we are anything but. Just look at all those nows coming down the road. We still have agency; we still govern our emotions and our own actions. There is nothing in the rulebook that says you are not allowed to try to change something. Or, as Alan Watts once said, “You're under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”
Yes, there are laws. Yes, there are oppressions. But even those you may try to change. And if you can’t just yet, well—that is just for now. Take heart. More nows are already on their way.