Affirmations: Be Here Now

This post is part of the February 2025 Indieweb Carnival, where Joe Crawford invited us to share personal affirmations - the sayings and mantras that help guide our lives.

Be Here Now. Three simple words that have carried me through the darkest valleys and highest peaks, both literally and figuratively. This mantra, popularized by Ram Dass, has been my companion through unthinkable loss, through ultra-distance runs, and increasingly, through our algorithm-infused world.

I first encountered these words during a period of profound grief, when the weight of loss made both past and future unbearable. The past was too painful to revisit, the future too uncertain to contemplate. Be Here Now became my anchor, a reminder that this moment - just this one - was all I needed to handle. It didn’t make the grief disappear, but it made it manageable, one present moment at a time.

Years later, I found myself returning to these words in a different context: ultra-running. When you’re 40 miles into an ultra, your mind becomes your greatest adversary. It wants to complain about every ache, project how much worse they’ll feel in 10 miles, replay every training run you missed, question every life choice that led you here. But none of that serves you. The only thing that matters is this stride, this breath, this moment. Putting one foot in front of the other. Keep moving forward. Be Here Now. The mantra becomes a rhythm, a meditation in motion, carrying you through the pain cave one step at a time.

Lately, I’ve found new meaning in these words as I navigate what the internet has become. The constant pull of notifications, the endless doomscrolling, the quantified metrics of our lives - they all conspire to pull us away from the present moment. They fragment our attention and scatter our consciousness, leaving us somehow both overstimulated and undernourished.

This led me to make significant changes: deleting corporate social media accounts, self-hosting my online presence, removing my fitness tracker after nearly two decades. Each change was a choice to Be Here Now, to experience life directly rather than through the lens of algorithms and analytics.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m sharing these thoughts on a digital platform. But there’s a profound difference between using technology mindfully and letting it use us. The IndieWeb movement itself embodies this distinction - it’s about being present and intentional in our digital lives, rather than passively consuming the algorithmic firehose.

Be Here Now isn’t about rejecting the past or ignoring the future. It’s about recognizing that the present moment is where life actually happens, where we have the power to act, to heal, and to grow. Whether I’m processing grief, pushing through physical or mental limits, or choosing how to engage with technology, these three words remind me to return to the only moment I can truly inhabit.

In a world that increasingly pulls our attention in a thousand directions, being here now is both a challenge and a radical act of self-preservation. It’s an affirmation I return to daily, a compass that always points to this moment, this breath, this now.