My new favorite cartoon is the brilliant one by Saul Steinberg reproduced at left (click to englarge.) This is brilliant not, of course, because it’s funny but because of the startling point the cartoonist makes.
The present is a hard place to live for so many of us. Why live in the now if we’re in pain? Why stay present to the present if it’s boring?
Conversely, we may suddenly struggle to stay in the present when we’re in the midst of a beautiful experience. Yet, since we haven’t spent much time practicing presence, we have trouble living in a moment we desire.
Dr. Victor Frankl believed that if we could learn to see beauty everywhere, we could learn to live in our now and thus truly live our lives. His credibility for such a statement is profound since he was a concentration camp survivor….
To learn to live see beauty everywhere, he had to find the ability to see it in the ugliest of conditions – inside a piece of stale bread, in the vacant eyes of his camp mates, in a stream of water falling off the edge of a barracks which was also his cell. Once he had learned to see beauty there, he could see it anywhere. When, after his years in hell, he was finally able to regain his freedom, his joy and energy knew no boundaries.
The spiritual practice I offer in today’s meditation is that we contemplate something we have always 
thought was ugly to see if, with persistence, we can discover beauty. Many artists have managed to find beauty in pieces of trash. What do you see in the photo at left? This exercise can allow us to see the ugliness first and then adjust our way of seeing so that elements of beauty may emerge.
Caregivers are confronted with this challenge every day in their work. The troubles people bring to caregivers are never pretty. And this exercise is not asking us to redefine traumatic energy as something attractive. Instead, it is to invite us to appreciate how we need to bring our best energy to the moments we spend with illness.
Recently, my younger sister had a severe attack of vertigo that required a trip to the Emergency Department. In the hours between the onset of the attack and the relief that came from good treatment there was the ugliness of her agony, her pain, the body’s futile struggle for balance which includes vomiting and horrible dizziness. I did not experience this pain, she did. As her temporary caregiver, my role was to be present to her and support her as best I could. It’s difficult for her to be present to such pain and, since I love her, it’s hard to be with her at such times of trouble. And it’s also a time of indescribable love for any two people who are willing to stay present to each other.
What is it like to live a now where every tick of the clock points not to the future or the past but only to the present? It’s a good thing for us to learn since right now is all we have.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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