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Always Now
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| Domenico Piazza Senior Associate |
It’s always now. We sometimes think that “now” is the plan we have for tomorrow. The plan, however, is now; its execution, when and if it occurs, will occur on a day that is also now. We seem to be stuck in the notion of Now, but we invent stories that appear to exist in another dimension. Such is the nature of our ever-inventive imaginations. We are capable of conjuring up the magical sense that what we are currently thinking about will manifest in some other time, outside the time we currently inhabit. Thus we relive the past and worry about the future, conflating them both into the present.
The problem with any fixed definition of the Now is that it is bound to be incomplete and misleading. It is the place in the river of life at which we have most recently dropped anchor. The river, however, ignores the fixed place and flows on toward some unknown destination. We have stopped on the river but the river has not stopped for us. Such is life.
It is popular to say “live in the Now,” but the context of Now involves the countless unfolding experiences of living; it is never static. By the time we utter the word “now,” it has vanished. We imagine, for example, that a still photograph has captured a slice of now. In reality, the photograph is a distortion which leads us to believe that “now” can be isolated and understood. A stopped river cannot be understood as “river” because it is the nature of a river to be in motion.
I understand the intention of focusing on the Now. But I recommend caution. In an attempt to experience the present, we may easily forget that the lens we use to be in the moment has been in formation for millennia. Our entire heritage, our collective experiences, have evolved to provide us with the perspective of the life we are living. Hence, what we call the Now is instead an endless series of evolutionary nuances which have the appearance of solidity but are as fluid as the rest of reality when viewed from the perspective of quantum science. If you’re willing and able to look closely enough, there is no such thing as a solid table.
Perhaps we can speculate and say we are living in the flow of our species’ history, taking the occasional snapshots and treating them as reality, as the Now.
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