Be here now

When I was a teen, a friend had "Be here now" written by hand on her school folder for several years, and I well remember the day Monica was daubing it in white paint, on a soon-to-be-demolished brick building at my high school, during the early hours of our Higher School Certificate year Muck-up Day in 1976.

No one really had to explain what "Be here now" meant, and no one even questioned where the phrase came from but, today, Google tells me it was the title of a 1971 book on spirituality by someone called Ram Dass.

Every now and then, that little phrase comes back to me, but because it's so intrinsically linked to the precise times when I first read - and pondered - it, not only can I be here now, but I am suddenly also there now, too.