I once spent a couple of days traveling with a woman who had been severely abused as a child. I was conscious both of her repeatedly expressed victimhood and my own tendency to try to save the victims that I come in contact with. By now I had understood that I have been carrying a deep sense of guilt, which I had tried to alleviate by saving all the ladies in distress that had come my way. And in the end I had always failed after a glorious beginning…

This time around I needed to find a new a way of meeting a distressed lady. I needed to be present without succumbing to my own “a knight on a white stallion” -syndrome. It was a challenge as the heavy and interdependent roles of victimhood/savior in both of us were dragging us to repeat ourselves, to repeat our past as our ever old future. How to overcome my own past, my past reactions? By now I already knew that I cannot overcome somebody else’s past.

One day we were walking by a mighty river flowing majestically beside our path along the riverbank. We were sharing, and I was listening willing to find a way through the mists of my own past reactions. The other person was expressing herself as best she good, and I needed to find a way of being new and present in the face of the past trying to take over this holy moment of now, where also the river was constantly renewing itself while still being the same…

Suddenly I realized that I needed “to care but not care”. I needed to care so much that I became utterly present in the face of what was taking place, what was expressed, so that my own past had no room to take it over. From that point of presence I could hear what the other was truly expressing and do my careful best to reveal it to myself and to her as well. At the same time in this caring presence I was able to express the truth of what I could sense without caring about the consequences of what I was saying or expressing. It was not for me to decide or worry about the other person’s experience. I just needed to be present.

And present I was, a present from beyond our personal pasts and traumas. This allowed something greater, something deep and profound to touch us, to remind us of who we truly are beyond our reactionary roles, our time-bound humanity. We are love that does not care about our past but cares of who we are in this Holy Now. We are Life Itself expressing itself now, and only now…