Why I hate people!

Okay, I don’t hate people, but I find it increasingly difficult to get along with them, and not for any reason you might come up with.

When I was teaching the martial arts if I talked to prospective students for more then four or five minute, beyond the simple questions of why do you want to study the martial arts, they would suddenly break into a story of a fight, or fights, they had gotten into.

At that point they were like stone tape recorders, I couldn’t get them to shut up. At all!

What’s so bad about talking about fights a person has been in? It is talking about something that has happened and has no relation to what is happening now. It is putting Was over Now.

When a person is born they have a short period, just a few years of natural excitement, of Now. Then they start accumulating experiences, and they want to talk about those experiences instead of creating new ones. Even at a young age they are stuck in the Was.

When somebody wants to tell me a story of what happened ten years and three states ago I know that I am in trouble. They are now being robots, and not actually in the Here and Now anymore.

What’s really irksome is when they speak of their future plans, instead of doing them. They are telling me a story of when might happen, and they are no longer in the Now. They are now caught in, and inflicting upon others, their fantasies of future Was.

There is the Now of planning the future, but past that, unless it has to do with the actual implementation of those plans, people should never talk about the Was that has not yet come to pass.

I’m getting old now, and living in a senior RV park. I enjoy it, except that the people here can only talk about two things. They talk about the pills they take and the operations they’ve had, or they talk about their children or grand children (they don’t visit, or live their lives in the right manner).

These people are stuck in the Was. They are back on the operating table, or in the fantasy of wishing their children would come by…presumably to share some of their Nowness with them.

As for me, I work six to eight hours a day, setting my sights on 10,000 words a day. After that I go for long bike rides, swim for an hour, read a book, or anything else that puts me in the Now, and avoids the Was.

The more Now you are the more enlightened you are, the more alive you are.

The more Was you are the more dead you are.