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Because there is nothing else. Here is the only space, now is the only time. Beyond the herenow, there is nothing.

Two thousand years ago, a great Jewish master, Hillel, wrote a little poem in Aramaic. The poem is this:

"If I’m not for myself,
Then who can be for me?

And if I’m only for myself,
Then what am I?

And if not now,
When?"

It is a beautiful statement: if not now, then when? Tomorrow? But the tomorrow never comes.

Hence I emphasize the herenow. Don’t let this moment slip by unused, unlived, unpenetrated; squeeze all that you can out of it. Live it passionately and with intensity, so you need not repent later on that you missed your life.

It was after the Second World War; the war had ended. Joe Dink was still in Japan waiting to be discharged. His wife, Irma Dink, was wild with anxiety and jealousy because she read about the goings on between the American soldiers and the Japanese girls. Finally she could stand it no longer, and she wrote her husband, “Joe, hurry up and come back. What do those girls have, anyway, that the American girls don’t?” “Not a thing,” wrote back Joe. “But what they have got, they have got here.”

And that is the most important thing. The question is of here and now.