Once Upon The Now

Once Upon The Now

Marty Glover

Copyright 2015 by Marty Glover

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimer: This writing involves personal stories. Names are omitted. However some of you may know these stories. Let’s do our best to keep quiet the ones who need not our attention. These anecdotes relate personally to my foundation: now. If any of this offends or upsets you, I will personally take your view as a compliment. Thank you for reading.

For a mother and a father

who will never give up on me.

To the friends who have seen me

and who also watched me leave.

Hear me now, for not all is lost.

The voice, it speaks. Can you hear me now?

Chapter One

Let's just start here, now. The first place anybody should ever really come to know and love is the present moment. It's where all the good stuff happens. It's where all the bad stuff happens. I mean, honestly... What's not to love?

I'm sure you can think of many a thing to not-love. And I can dig that. Even agree with some of it I'm sure. However I reach a point of diminishing returns... How much can I really hate anything? Even in my biggest of enemies I can find that I love the hate that I share for them. The biggest of struggles and the worst of experiences followed with Well, at least I learned something from that. Not all was lost.

But I mean at that point you wonder what you ever were doing to begin with. Why did you have to put such titles, ideas, or standards on what you were doing? Was it really all that important to you in the first place? How did you get to be doing what you were, that made you so upset or jubilant that you decided to put such enmity in it? Such big words for such a meaningless task...

What were you doing? When you realized you hated something? When you realized you loved something? Was there a brief moment of awareness? An... Ah-Hah! a sort of lights-on moment? Those moments if you've ever felt them, well, they're my favorite. Once I started to understand the pleasure of understanding... That's when everything changed.

That's when I went from just passively living my life to searching for new ways to think; for new things to do. For novel experience and things that I had never done before. The redundancy of being redundant sort of came to a halt. No longer did I want to do the things I had been doing. But an entirety of my being and my element was changed.

What was it for you that made it happen the first time? Can you remember the first time you ever felt that break through moment in your head? That moment of clarity when you could just see everything so, so, so clearly. Everybody’s moment is different. And usually it's different for everybody -- the nature of experience so personalized and natural.

I believe piano was my first breakthrough experience. Learning how to play a song from a video game. It involved using both hands at the same time in syncopation. It was tough! I literally had to sit there at the piano and go finger by finger, note by note, until I got it right. And then I had to do it again. And again. But oh my goodness. The first time I did it without thinking about it? Just playing it? That's when everything changed.

No longer was this song just a repetition of notes, but an absolute extension of all of my time, effort, and personal drive towards a goal. I had completed one of my first biggest mental goals -- a personal achievement and an accomplishment. I felt proud of myself! I could show for some of my time, some of my effort. In a way that some people might even appreciate other than myself. It truly felt like an extension of my time that went without waste.

At no point should you hope that I have a definite point in all of this. I like relating all of my writing to anecdote. I try to give examples for my concepts. I try to inject my voice into my writing. And most of all, I try to make it personal. I don't really know what that means yet. But a lot of people say that my writing is fluid, natural, and smooth. I don't disagree. I just don't quite understand what makes it that way yet.

It's like I can entertain all sorts of different trains of thought at once. I mean, we all can! But me, these different trains... I can connect them all. As I started to play music more, I would understand that it's not hard to find your way back to an original idea. As long as I understood what I was trying to play, it really wasn't that difficult for me to come back down to what I was trying to say. By taking you through a couple of different trains of thought (or thought-loops, as I like to call them) at the same time, we can wrap our head around really big concepts without thinking very hard or extensively about them. Just follow the voice.

So as we follow trains of thoughts, we'll all come to our own individualized understanding of what I'm trying to say. For example, I'll be trying to say something. But you'll be trying to understand what even something sounds like. There's already a first degree of separation in my speech – that of misunderstanding; the perfect ability to not-know what I'm saying. You may hear me clearly say something but you may be completely unaware of me actually saying something.

This is a really cool concept because we deal with it on a daily basis. I notice this with cars all the time. My family just got a jeep. Therefore, everywhere around town I go I now notice Jeeps. Man. It's not that I hadn't seen all these cars before. It's just that I hadn't been aware of them. And awareness is a funny thing dude, because you can never force somebody to be aware. It's sort of like an individualized thing. It looks different for everybody. However, some things seem to hit common threads amongst many.

I've found that Truth is a really cool concept. Difficult to explain. But best to start that Truth is self-evident. It needs nobody to see it for it to be Truth. However, those that can acknowledge it can learn much from it. It's something that you can know in multiple forms. In action, in concept, and even in description. I can act truly. I can know a theorem to be true. Truly, it has many shapes and forms. All sorts of fun wordplay come into concepts that go across vocabulary. If almost there was a chasm, Truth is a wonderful was to cross it.

Imagine a way of communication, that no matter how unaware a person was, that they could still comprehend it. A concept, an idea so simple, that even a caveman could grasp. What if Truth is one of the most fundamental ideas we could ever grasp? It's food for thought. But it's easy to see somebody who acts in Truth versus somebody who doesn't.

I'm rambling, but I think I've got a good tangent... Why does it seem that people have certain vibes around them? Some good, some bad, indifferent, otherwise... I mean. I could be reading into just the person’s personality. How they're acting; their body-language and word-play. I could be watching every little action that they were giving me as part of our attention-exchange (conversation?). It's not hard to see if somebody is distracted in conversation. It's not hard to tell if somebody is bored. If in-fact, in a face to face conversation, it is easy to read somebody's expressions and make an educated guess at how they're feeling.

However many assumptions one can make about body-language, it's usually always best to check.. I mean. Asking permission for anything in any way shape or form is never a bad thing. Just saying. I'd rather have some communication instead of not.. Errr... Where was I going again?

Lets start again, here, now. We're back! Welcome full circle. Did you like where we were going? Absolutely nowhere and awfully fast at that. And it's about at this point that I recommend that if you didn't like the pace, structure, or the destination, that you leave. Seriously, if this isn't your style, don't waste any more of your time and put this down. Stop reading. It's better off that way. Seriously. If you're a person who is sure that this isn't what you want to be reading, I don't know why you keep moving those eyes forward. Why give any more benefit of the doubt to something you don't like already? Save us both some frustration and leave now.

Again. We're going nowhere fast. And the destination usually starts and ends here now. It's where anything I'll ever filter would technically be. Unless I'm looking back in time... but even still, that's me, now, looking back to a previous now. It's just a sort of time loop wonky thing.. I try not to think too much about time or time travel. Once you understand that it's all here, now, you start understanding the past and the future is all around you. It's literally just waiting on you to shape it. When you're here, now, you literally shape both, simultaneously. I don't know exactly how. But there's guru's on YouTube who know how to explain that.

I just like enjoying the moment. Because even some of my worst experiences have been awesome. Like my first time getting blackout drunk and throwing up? Yeah! I remember throwing up and saying I seriously love how much I can hate this because I'm never going to do this again. – Likely excuse. I still drank occasionally and it still happened a few times. But seriously, even in a really bad moment, I was able to experience both ends of the spectrum at the same time.

What is light, without its absence? I mean, surely, it's something. But what is something without its nothing? Every yin to its yang. Light isn't always good however, and dark not always bad. People do just as many bad things in the day as they do at night. It's just the user who ultimately determines the crime or the charity. Remember. They both happen. Just because we hear about one more than the other doesn't mean that the other isn’t happening. I wonder what would happen if news channels chose to feature one charity to donate on a daily basis? Bleh. Whatever.

I really never feel good after writing this. It's sort of like exposing yourself to people. I mean. Anytime you really go out in public you expose something of your self. I guess it's just my writing that I get more self-conscious about than my appearance. I don't mean to sound facetious. It's just I'm more comfortable in my physical than my speech or mannerisms -- which might actually explain why I have such a self-conscious complex and why I really enjoy working out and stuff. Heh. Funny what you might end up telling other people.

But hey, all in