(Someone shared this brief article with me many years ago. There was no attribution. If I ever find out the author I will give appropriate credit. The article has deepened my understanding of what I like to call the “sacred” present moment.)

We live only a day at a time. It is impossible to live a year or even a month, let alone a lifetime. We live like day lilies, short-lived beauty, flowers in a garden. “You have a day to live” is not a threat but a promise. It is, in fact, all we have. We are, for the most part, capable of handling a day. The event of a day, in fact, may be the extent of our experiential capacity. It is marked, finite, manageable. A day is enclosed, hedged in by the two secure boundaries of night. It is the perfect structure in which to live. A day is a recapitulation of a lifetime: sunrise-birth, noon-ascendancy, afternoon-gentle decline, and night’s return to the primordial dark.

A day belongs supremely to nature, but a year is unnatural. A year is an artifice, a convenience for historians and educators; it is an abstraction, a time frame for scientists. Most anything beyond a day seems unmanageable and ungraspable. A day remains the best measure of a lifetime.

A single day is a series of opportunities, of openings, into the heart of time. “Take your time” doesn’t mean only “go slowly” or “go at your own pace.” It means that we should take time in our own hands in the here and now, hold it, and be in it, as it were. When we hold a day, we hold a series of moments. Perhaps the smallest unit of livable time is the moment. A moment is some “once,” yet forever, thing. There is a quality of onceness to all real life – a non-repeatable onceness! It is all we have, but it is enough. Everything that is, was, and shall be, was one day packed into an infinitesimally small byte of matter. In the same way an epic story can be packed into a moment, a nanosecond. We live each day, aware or unaware, making our way through a series of moments. We witness and participate in its coming and going  –  if we are alert that is. Over the course of a day, seemingly discrete moments will connect, or link together in a “flow” that follows the daily pattern into and out of the sun.

Broad outlines of past eons or projections of the future are all mental constructs, and as such they are too much for the body-psyche to grasp. We are however as I choose to believe, lovingly hedged into the possibilities inherent in the little rhythms of a day.

To live a day well, full of trust, is to live one’s life. Perhaps on the proverbial judgment day we shall be asked, not what we did with our lives, but what we did with this or that day that rose to meet us asking us only that we live within its limits or live even in the short life of a moment.