The Time is Now

One of the hardest concepts for me to grasp is probably the simplest. Life is lived only in the moment, and the moment is not ours, and it's gone before we can process it. Look around you. Close your eyes. Look again. What you see now is not what you saw before, though the changes may be subtle. But the time before is irretrievably gone, fallen into what we call the past.

And the past is beyond our reach; what we recall is only a hazy picture of what was and, more fundamentally, subject to change. Memories aren't dormant images, like photos in a file; they are mental processes stored in a living brain, colored by wishes, fears, and conflation with the present. Like going back to one's childhood home -- how small it looks, and how different. If you were to be magically transported back there, you wouldn't fit in. The you now is not the you of then, not by any stretch. Someone once wrote, "The past is another country. They speak differently there." We've changed as time goes by, and our memories have changed to match our newer selves.

The future is another story. And a fully fictional one at that. It doesn't exist in any way, save as a concept, an idea, a projection filled with hopes, fears, and fiction. It's not promised to us, and it's subject to an infinite range of events we have little idea of, and absolutely no control over. Tom Petty somewhere says something about most things we fear never coming to be; and I think that's the way our dreams are too. I just recently heard someone say that we often mortgage our present on the bet that the future will make it worthwhile. But it's only a bet, a gamble, wishful thinking.

So that leaves us with this, this flash of living that 's gone before we know it.

But to say it's gone is a misstatement. Another way to look at it is, it's infinite. It's only gone because we try to own it, grab hold of it, preserve it if we like it, escape it if we don't. I suspect we can learn to accept it as it comes by, and appreciate the sensation of life, distinct from our thoughts, dreams, fears, and hopes.

Old man flashback here: long ago, so long that any stature of limitations has long expired, I tried some mescaline tinted with LSD. The result, to my insecure and fearful self, was a terrible "trip," in which the world as I knew it refused to stay in place. The worst part, though, was when I tried to tell myself to hang on, that this will pass in a matter of hours and my world would return.

At that moment my consciousness told me something else: that the idea of time is an illusion, that each moment lasts forever, that I had to fully be where I was, that I couldn't promise myself the future. At that point I felt I was lost, that I had fallen into a bottomless rabbit-hole.

Of course the drug did wear off, and I came back to my more stable world-construct.

But the experience and the lesson have stayed with me. Today I fully believe in the endless present, and that I don't need to surrender myself to a foreign influence to appreciate it.

All I need to do -- and that is one of the biggest, most illusive "alls" I can know of -- is stop trying to own the present, stop trying to escape into an illusory past or future, and just be here, in the now. Accept it as it flows by. Right now it's wonderful; I'm sitting on my screened porch, the birds are singing, the grass is vibrant green, the sky bright white clouds reflecting the morning sun. My mind tells me it won't always be like this, not always wonderful, that it's not this way for everyone, that someday I will be gone.

All probably true, though all constructs of my mind.

All I know for certain is that I am here now, whoops, was here then, and am here now, and on and on and on (I think).

What I have is now, all there is is now, and now is passing by.

The sun has broken through the clouds, the finches are fighting over the birdseed, a slight breeze moves through. I'm alive and that's a wonderful gift.

Good morning to you all.