Everything happens once. You will read these words only once. You will think about this very idea once. You breathe once. You see the people you love in your life once. You have every thought and feeling once. You only exist once.

But we don’t see it, it’s as if we do everything we can to hide from this fact. We are blessed and cursed with this ego, the keeper of our story, the one that needs to hang on to as much information as possible to make the idea of ‘me’ possible and life known and predictable. We form habitual thought patterns that give the illusion of things happening over and over again, with some variations, but at the end of the day, we think ‘here we go again’ a lot.

And as we do this, we lose our ability to see, to be present and experience the uniqueness of each moment as it occurs, because it gets hidden and muddled in that cloud of our thinking. Our lives turn into predictable and planned patterns, no matter if they are positive or negative, they are still patterns. Funny thing is, every single time I have a similar thought and repeat it, it is yet happening only once each time. Through all the repetition they stop feeling unique, but we have every thought and feeling once. Again and again. Stepping outside of the pattern thrusts us into the moment, and with that comes an instant ‘Vu Ja De,’ that feeling we get when we are sure that this has never happened before … and the realization that it will never happen again because it happens only once, right here and right now. Everything in existence exists only once. Every moment, every occurrence, every wisp of life in and out of form. Nothing and no thing repeats itself, ever. Literally.

At first this notion made me very sad and bummed me out, because this meant to me that life was utterly fleeting. If all happens only once, then there is nothing to hold on to after all, it happens once, never to happen again. Kinda depressing actually. But as these musings go in my life, once they show up, they don’t leave me alone until I pay attention and look a little further into it. This one was uncomfortable because it touches that last border, that veil in my life that I will never be able to fully understand and frankly stay away from: The fact of my own eventual departure from this plane of existence. Much like the character in my book, I struggle with this. And thinking about everything only existing once makes this much more real.

If everything only occurs once, then how can it exist? How can there be continuity in anything? How does anything grow? How can I exist? That doesn’t make sense to me, and yet I know somehow that this whole ‘once’ thing is true. Being in time is the answer. We live in a concept and state of time, though this is fluid at best, and it provides the succession of singular events, the whole ‘one thing happens after another’ idea. Cause and effect. Physics. It all builds on one another, and all of this is possible because we live within the concept of time. Without it, it all goes out the window. Stepping outside of time for a moment makes the moment unique, showing us that it is happening only now, once, never to return. Only through our ability to step back into time by remembering it, can it ‘return.’

Do you do or have anything in your life that makes you feel great? Maybe a favorite meal, drink, activity, person, any kind of circumstance? One of those things you love to do? We love that feeling and long for it, and thus we repeat the activity, but all we are doing is recreating the feeling, repeating the behavior to reproduce it again and again. In fact we are simply doing a lot of re-ing, and thus are simply giving ourselves a carbon copy. We are missing out on the onceness of it all. Nothing wrong with this, except it puts us in a state of varying degrees of blindness to the moment.

This has been with me for the past few weeks, and by allowing it into my awareness, I have noticed more around me. It started by thinking about everything happening once, which led to some anxiety at first because it also meant that it may be the last time I got to experience whatever I was experiencing at the moment, but slowly it has transformed into more of a wonder about life. I find myself being struck by the onceness of a taste, a thought, a feeling, and I see that nothing repeats itself, except my thought about it. My mind has become a little quieter so that I can pay better attention. It is sad and awe inspiring at the same time. It all happens only once.

Play with this yourself and try it on for size. What if this is true and everything happens only once? Hold this idea in your mind during your next meal, conversation, bike ride, interaction with anyone, ‘this is only happening once, never again.’ You may just be so glad that you got to be around while it was happening.

Cheers,

Ralf