It’s a dank autumnal evening, and I’m walking home after a coaching session with Charles. “Everything is going to be alright” says the neon sign blinking through the mist which drifts over the Thames. These comforting words are incongruously affixed to the top of Tate Britain. But are they really comforting? And if they are, what does it say about us?

My point is that the words would be much more powerful if they said “everything IS alright.” We have this obsession about living in the future; we derive comfort from the fact that something will be better tomorrow, but yet tomorrow never comes.

If we live in expectation of tomorrow we will set up that pattern, that habit and so will be ever looking forward and never experience the moment. We will never actually live in the here and now – will never actually live in anything other than a fantasy of our perceptions and aspirations that never actually come true for us. For even if they do, because we are so future focussed we don’t even notce.

Now is alright. Now is always alright. The now is all there is – the now is absolute truth and the only real truth. The only reality.

Our ego, our make-believe neurotic self, will have us convinced that we are creating an eternal life, an everlasting life, by building for tomorrow. Yet looking underneath this, we find the reality: that all we really need, we already have

I have everything I need for now. A breath is freely available to me at any moment and it can be as deep as I am able to draw. There is no limit on the abundance of the air about me – I am overwhelmed by abundance in any moment; there is always more breath available than I will ever be able to draw. 

Everything IS alright now.

 Enjoy it.

Andy Turnbull