In the here and now

Sometimes the most obvious observations are the most startling. Have you noticed, for instance, that our daily lives are entirely ruled by our idea of past and future? We are always thinking about what we will do, what we will become, either this afternoon, or tomorrow, or sometime down the vague road before us. And what we do do is mostly determined by the past: by the habits we have built up. By the identities that we associate with ourselves, or simply by the sheer weight and bulk of all our past years, which easily steamroll over the millisecond that we call the present moment.

Laziness is often equated with apathy, indifference, irresponsibility - but I would like to suggest a different source, which is being caught squarely between the terrorizing forces of past and future. In all our moments of apathy, of stasis, when we lie in bed for half an hour after waking, or when we stay one more year in a job, a place, we know deep down is not quite right for us - what is happening but that we are fixed in the hold of two essentially fictitious times? The momentum of our past stasis carries us over and continues its hold on us because we are overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what might come next.

But if a moment only becomes "past" when we look back on it, is there ever such a thing as a "past moment," or a "past time"? Or were they actually just "present" moments, in the same way our future is just a different "present"? Maybe our lives don't resemble a tiny point moving through a sea of "was" and "will be", like so:

pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp!ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

where "p" are past moments, and "f" are future moments, and that "!" is the only point that we really know and control. Maybe, instead, our lives are a series of presents, like so:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But even the phrase "series of presents" is misleading, because it suggests a chronology, that some presents come before or after others - which is really impossible, because aren't all presents "now"? Doesn't every one of them happen at the exact same time (that is, "now"), and therefore it is paradoxical to say that there are future and past "presents"? Aren't all present moments simultaneous, or - perhaps even more radically - could we then say that there is only one Present moment, one now that encapsulates the whole of your life?

We normally think of ourselves as moving from point A to point Z, say on a racetrack. We begin, and there is an ever diminishing amount of track before us, and an ever increasing amount behind. As we run, we may think that we can still change our course before us, while we accept that the path we have already run is fixed in the past. Here is another way to think of it. Life is a river. And you are not on a little boat making your way down the river - you are the river. A river flows in time; it flows from the mouth of its source, down winding through the land, and ends when it empties itself into the sea. But even as it flows in time, a river exists simultaneously at the mouth and the sea: even if you are standing at the birthplace of the river, somewhere, somewhere at the same time the river is dying. Though the river moves from A to Z, every point along its long and cursive path exists simultaneously, that is, they are all presents.

Does it require too great a feat of imagination to believe that all the points of our lives, too, are simultaneous? It is not a concept that comes easily, and not one that is easy to fix constantly in our minds, because our experience speaks so much against it - we see our lives chronologically, one infinitesimal slice at a time. But we are not like the figure on the racetrack, who is only in touch with the immediate ground below. We seep into our pasts and futures, and they into us. The future changes with every tiny motion that we make - you could say that every decision, every small gesture, even the decision to remain still, pushes the refresh button on the browser of your life. If I stab myself in the arm now, my whole life up to the very end changes, and if I don't, then it will look completely different. But at the same time, we also control our past - just as our past can dominate us, so too can an act of courage and impulse in the present moment reject all that has come before, and in that way change its meaning and its import. How a story ends changes the whole story, not just the ending.

What am I trying to say with all of this? Maybe, as a species, we are always in transition. We plan for the future; we feel compelled by the past. We can't bring ourselves to make dinner at the end of a long day, not only because we are tired, but because we feel ourselves to be tired - we remember the day, and think to all the things that are yet to be done, and feel justified in saying, "Let me be." It's as if everyone walks around with blindfolds on, or rather with two faces, one pointed to the past, one to the future, and no one really sees that they are here now, now, a person on the planet who exists in this moment and who has complete control over this moment. This is not "Live every moment as if it's your last," even though it sounds a lot like it, but rather something like, "Live every moment because it is your last, first, and every other in between." Remember: the river exists at all points at once. If you are lazy in this one moment, you are lazy in all your moments, past and future. But you can always rewrite the whole thing in the next. Every moment is a decision on how you will live the entirety of your life, past and future.

Let me return to the beginning of this essay, and offer an alternative. You know those stories you hear about mothers who are able to lift cars off of their trapped children? Or how you can write more in the last half hour before a paper is due than you had in the last three weeks? In moments of great pressure, we are forced to wrench our eyes out in front of us and really see where we are. But this happens all too rarely. Think of that focus, that power that comes when we really live in the moment we are in, when we are driving toward a deadline or reacting out of impulse to save a life. But the past and the future have such a hold on us, and we are trained to let them in.

I'm not saying that being under great pressure is the only way to get there, but rather that those moments of achievement - we all have them - moments when we surprised ourselves, transcended our normal routine and did something remarkable, can teach us that any moment can be opened to the same freedom. If you are sitting at your computer, look up and realize that you are alive, that you exist here and now, that you can do whatever you want in the next moment because there is nothing holding you down, past or future. It's a remarkable feeling, and a scary one, as if you have now just taken your blindfold off, and can see where you are in the world. I cannot describe it better than this: it feels like entering the world.