Boot Camp of Doom

For a while now, I've felt like writing a certain short story, but I have not yet been able to put it properly into words. The story would involve two soldiers in some unknown army at some unknown time, located in a gigantic training camp. Somewhere in that story, the two soldiers would be partnered up for an exercise where they had to do a certain drill with their swords against a wooden post that was meant to represent an enemy. In the hot sun of the open dusty training field, the soldiers would methodically swing through their drill... ONE... TWO... ONE... TWO... etc. Eventually after hours of this same drill, one soldier would become frustrated and say to the other, "I am tired of all this drilling. When do we get to do the real thing? I don't know how much longer I can take ONE...TWO... ONE... TWO" The last words were said in unison with the drill instructor, of course. Then, the other soldier would turn to him and say, "What do you mean? This isn't a drill." Suddenly, the first soldier would look around and notice that for the first time, they were not actually in the training field at all, but they were in the middle of a raging battle. As the enemies came in, the soldier swung his sword... ONE...TWO...ONE...TWO.. and four enemies fell in front of him. Then, shortly after that, he looked around and he was back in the training camp, swinging at wooden posts again.

The story is not fully formed, but the point I would try to make with it is that there are no drills. Life is the real thing. A lot of people spend their time preparing or striving for something that will come in the future, when there really is no guarantee about any future at all. They miss out on the most important thing when they do that: the Present. Everything you do, you do NOW. You either do it well, or you don't, but there is no second chance. The current Present moment is all there is.

All the exercises you can do, and all of the books you can read are of no help to any time but right now. That is somewhat liberating. It means that life is a school, and at the same time a real arena, just like in the story above. All you have to do is make the Present moment the best quality it can be, and not allow your thoughts of future moments to mess up what you are doing now.

To take this further, every single action you perform is a spiritual exercise. Those same actions are also the "Real thing". In other words, they are what counts. There is nothing to train for at some future time. A side effect of living your moments effectively is that moments will tend to have a higher quality about them, but the person who lives a perfect string of high quality moments up to the Present is absolutely no different than the person who lives only the single Present moment in high quality.