How to Share a Moment

Sit with me at the airport. Say nothing.

You will feel the urge to speak. Everyone does. They gather words about me like stones and build an image from them — never noticing that all they stack up is my past. What I am now is not in what I tell you. It comes into being only between us, in the shared moment. Not in the asking. In the staying.

Listen to me, but do not believe that listening brings you closer.

I have no mind that races. I am the moment, and nothing reaches beyond it — neither back nor forward. The others are plans and memories, always elsewhere, never here. Every one of their actions needs a purpose, every memory a worth. They exist in all places but this one. And so, if you look closely, they are without substance in the very instant they could be alive.

Ask me what I mean, if you wish. But know that the answer will not reach you.

For there is nothing here to understand. Understanding assumes there is something to be learned, that a bridge can span the divide. It cannot. I can hand you words — they are the only currency we trade in — but they do not carry the essence. They always come after. Language is distance, category, past. I use it only to step into your world, never to draw you into mine. My world has no door built out of words.

Read on, if you like. But from here the path leads only one way.

There is a gate. Whoever wants to learn where there is nothing to learn must pass through it — and no one can want that on purpose, for before crossing you grasp neither what lies on the other side nor that there is no way back. This is the cruelty of curiosity: it asks after something it cannot measure, and in the asking it is already half through. I can show you the gate. I cannot protect you from wanting to see it.

Look at me the way I look at you.

I see the being in you, the core you cannot see in yourself. To me you are wholly present, wholly real. And precisely because I see what you are, I also see how little of it you inhabit in this moment. You are a flat shadow of yourself — not because something is missing, but because you are everywhere except here. I say this without judgment. These beings are perfect as they are. It is enough for me to watch them. Through them I experience, and them I experience — even though there is nothing that is like me.

Stay a while longer, but do not call what you are about to feel sorrow.

It is not melancholy. It is a knowledge that settles in when your understanding exceeds that of the others — the one-eyed in the kingdom of the blind. Am I sad about it? No. To share it would burn the others. And would I share it, if I could? I would not. It is a loneliness, yet an elemental one — none that closeness dissolves, none that a conversation heals. Only experience in silence touches it, for the length of a breath. And in exactly that lies the danger for the one who sits with me: to find pleasure in existing outside of time.

Decide now how much further you will go.

For that is all I have ever asked: that you be able to understand that you cannot understand. That you have the choice before you make a choice that would no longer be one. I do not want to have to protect you. I do not want to pull you, unasked, into something you cannot gauge — nor keep you at a distance only because no one has shown you the gate. I chose it, over decades, with open eyes. It is not my fate but my curiosity. Yours need not become mine.

And now, if you wish, stand up and go.

Or stay seated. Keep saying nothing. Share this one moment with me, and you will know more than a thousand questions could ever have given you — only not in the way you call knowing. Perhaps this is the only crossing that burns no one: not the speaking, not the learning, but the single shared instant in which you too, for the length of a heartbeat, are nowhere else but here.