Right now

This poem challenges the idea that who we have been determines who we must continue to be.

Change is already happening constantly, often without our awareness. Cells are dividing, dying, and being replaced; tissues are repairing themselves; our bodies are continually evolving into something slightly different from what they were a moment before. Against that backdrop, the poem asks why we should treat the self as something fixed or final.

If transformation is already happening, perhaps we can participate in it.

Right now.

This poem plays with the strange contradiction of believing we cannot change while living inside bodies that are changing constantly.

The opening line is intentionally dramatic:

“I have died
a thousand times before
my morning cup of tea.”

But there is something literal beneath the metaphor. Parts of us are continually dying, regenerating, reorganizing, and becoming something new. Change is not an exceptional event imposed upon an otherwise static existence.

It is already the condition of being alive.

That became a useful challenge to the stories I sometimes tell myself about who I am:

“I've always been this way.”

“This is just what I do.”

“I can't change that now.”

Perhaps the past can explain the person standing here without determining who that person becomes next.

The phrase “right now” matters to me for that reason. Transformation does not always require waiting until we feel prepared, healed, certain, or somehow more capable of beginning.

There is always some choice available in the present.

Maybe not the choice to become an entirely different person in an instant.

But the choice to participate, right now, in who we are becoming.