I've found myself thinking a lot lately about the temporal nature of our existence. There's a rising awareness of how our increased "connectedness" is perhaps not so ironically creating a disconnectedness with the things actually going on around us. I'm not one to argue against technology, I make my living on it. I also am a big believer in the power of information and I can't help but marvel at the beauty of being able to watch how we create and consume it evolving before my eyes. I honestly believe that it's a marvelous time we live in. My mind doesn't fixate on whether or not all of this media and technology is a good or bad thing, because like anything in the world, it is limited by what we choose to give to it. No the interesting thing for me is in the why.
Why does our drilling in to these various conduits, sometimes 2 or 3 at the same time, affect us so adversely? It's not enough to just know something is true, it's important for me to understand why it's true. I think that's why I've been thinking so much about the way time governs our experience of the world. The Buddhists have a concept called mindfulness. It's not something unique to them, lots of religions or philosophies deal with the concept and it's importance in some way, but it's a cornerstone of Buddhism.
Mindfulness is, in the simplest terms, learning to allow yourself to be fully immersed in the current moment of your life. As human beings, we are always present in our own lives, barring maybe a coma or something, but presence or mindfulness isn't really a binary state. It's more of a scale. The Buddhists believe that real contentment comes from learning to invest ourselves completely in this moment that we are living right now, body and mind. To bend our full attention to whatever it is we are doing, no matter how important we think it is or isn't.
That's a concept which I feel like adds value to my life and so I try to do it with varying degrees of success. Specifically, I've been trying to actively unplug more and be present in my own life lately. But because I've been making an effort again to incorporate it into my daily life, I've also found myself trying to fully wrap my mind around the subtle and profound truths associated with what seems like such a simple concept. And that's why I can't get past the way time and mindfulness are inextricably linked.
Being present in this moment is so important because it's the only one that's real. Even as time carefully folds this moment into existence, at that same instant it begins unraveling it. You can experience this moment with the full complement of your facilities and senses if you allow yourself to. It has smell and tactlessness and sound, etc. You have thoughts and emotions that are unprompted and untarnished. They spring forth out of the ether as a result of you reacting to right now. Every bit of right now is available to you in whatever way you choose to experience it. It is completely real, at least to you.
But as soon as that moment passes it begins to fade. And the further it passes from right now, the more it fades. The moments very near to right now still seem pretty crisp, but they have already begun to change within us. As they move further from right now, and thus from us, bits of information fall more and more away from them. Our brain fills this in with things it thinks it should be there or colors it with our own perceptions of the event as we believe it should be. We can never experience it again the way we did that first time. Even when we write down what we felt, or watch videos that have the sights and sounds, we are touching only a fragment of that moment and the experience we are now having is not of that moment, but of our attempt at remembering that moment.
The future also becomes more blurry as it moves away from us. We can guess at what might happen in the future, but we can never know for certain. It's tied closely to probability, and the probability that a moment will become real is very high the closer it is to right now and drops quickly as we move out further into time. For example, if someone throws a baseball at your head, each moment that passes, the chance that the baseball is going to hit you becomes higher and higher. It's not certain because something could happen that would change it like someone snatching it or it spontaneously exploding. But as we start to look a week out. Or a year out. Or a thousand years out. Well then the future becomes very unknown to us. Those moments are not real things, they are just a collection of possibilities.
And so here I am. Trying to remember to appreciate THIS moment every moment of the day. And some times it's exhausting and I just want to wander. And sometimes the moments are painful and I just want to escape. Sometimes life is hard or boring or just not what I expected. And so I have to constantly remind myself that this moment is real and that I have to choose to tune in to my own life. The moments of my life continue to pass through my fingers like sand. One of the beauties of life is that every new moment is another opportunity to choose what to do with it. To choose who I am.