Wednesday, August 6, 2025
Many of us are unfamiliar. We’re not familiar with being alone. Then, we have to be. We’re not familiar with being single. Then a partner dies or moves on, and life brings us singleness. When we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory, we panic.
I’ve never been familiar with being broke. Time to get familiar. I’ve never been familiar with a terminal illness. Time to get familiar. I’ve never been familiar with being 51, 52, or 53. Here it comes. I’m not familiar with death. Mr. Reaper, I presume?
I used to be intimately familiar with worrying. It was my constant companion, my insidious bedfellow. I also loved and obsessed and fantasized about the future. I was a stalker, a creeper. I made love to the future in my mind, lustful and insidious. I kept the fantasy alive. But it’s hard to keep up with what’s not real.
Do you see how your secret love affair with the scary, “unfamiliar future” is insidiously pleasurable? Worry is the familiar state, the comfort, the default. Being present, that’s unfamiliar. The best thing in this life is to drop the insidious love affair, the fantasy of tomorrow or “when I.”
Get familiar with now, as soon as you can. Awaken to your senses. Awaken to truth! Live in a perpetual state of familiarization, and you will have found the comfort of hope, the companionship of openness, and the freedom of trust. Romanticizing worry puts the future at the top of your lustful, conquering exploits. We’re unfamiliar with leaving the future alone. Why must the love affair continue? Say goodbye to what you can never know intimately, something we call “later.” Reintroduce yourself to the wonders and immersion of NOW.
The familiar state is worry. The unfamiliar? Letting go of the fantasy of “later.” Your true love calls, now.