‘If we are to live in the “now”, what do we do with those two bookends, past and future?’

Thought for the week: Tony Tucker has a tense moment

‘He who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sunrise’ William Blake.

Blake the visionary captures a thought that is much with us at the present time. In the Covid crisis we have, of necessity, found ourselves detached from our normal daily round. In an effort to find a positive response to our changed circumstances some have advocated that we ask ourselves to ‘live in the moment’.

For many it has been good advice. During enforced isolation people speak of hearing what has gone unheard before – birdsong, the movement of the wind through trees – and of seeing what is always there but has gone unnoticed – that old elm tree, the passing blossom, a lone buzzard with a transcendent gracefulness turning and turning again as it rides a thermal. In our daily lives we often listen without hearing and look without seeing, so attentiveness of this kind can be an entirely enriching experience.

‘Being in the moment’ has in part come to our thinking as a result of the ‘mindfulness’ movement – an abridged, westernised version of Buddhist thought and practice. Some Buddhists would point out that it requires years of effort to ‘live in the now’ – to still the relentlessly restless mind – so perhaps we should, at the very least, tread carefully around this idea.

For me, however, a more complex issue arises over the question of our experience of time. If we are to live in the ‘now’, what do we do with those two bookends, past and future? Do we slough off the past because it is irrecoverable? Or deny the future as non-existent?

Certainly being held captive by one’s past, or reaching out to an imagined future at the cost of a lived present, is unhealthy. The author William Faulkner wrote that ‘The past is not dead, it is not even past’. We are our past, an embodied past. Of course we can rewrite, obscure or forget it. But it reaches into our present, and into our future. Life is a succession of moments. But not so existence. Human existence is unique in that we are always our own possibility. A stone has no future. It simply is. Organic life – the natural world, the creatures around us – has growth and development, but only within a biologically-determined lifecycle. To be human is always to be in the throw.

A painter makes a mark entirely in the moment, yet even in that moment the brushstroke is charged with possibility. Each stroke is a stepping stone to the next and an opening into the fullest realisation of the work at hand. We alone are what we might be, both being and becoming. Past, present and future.

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Comments

Thanks Tony, that’s a good insight. The ‘nowness of now’ is very difficult to grasp. As soon as one has grasped it, it has gone! The process theologian John B Cobb Jr has a way of explaining it all, through an appreciation of light. When we look at a star, we are seeing the star as it was when the light left it.
If that is true for a star, so it must also be true for the objects around us, even if fleetingly so. After all, the light still has to leave the object, pass through to the back of the eye, the cells there still must experience the light particles falling onto them, and thereby send electrical signals to the brain. The brain must then work out what the signals mean, form it all into an image, turn it the right way up and present it to us in the visual cortex. We then must focus particularly on the object to really become conscious of it. This takes quite a while!
So the past is all around us. Our ‘specious present’, the length of time we can perceive as the present, is about a tenth to a fifth of a second. That is ‘the moment’. What are we doing in this moment? We are taking what is in fact the past, selecting those aspects of it we wish to focus on, and adding our own ‘flavour’ to it, thereby making that our present experience.
This is how we remember people, re-member people. We make them a member again of our present experience by recalling them, re-calling them, or those aspects of them we choose to recall, to the present moment from our memory of them. This is why memory is often described as selective. What of the future? There are only a limited number of possibilities for any future moment, given that it arises from the past. But it is not yet determined.
Where is God in all this? According to process theology, God has no power to force events. Omnipotence as traditionally understood is a theological mistake. God can only ‘lure’ us all - individually - to the good, call us forward to betterment moment by moment. Every living thing, moment by moment. It seems to me that really is still quite some power! I find it to be rather more impressive in fact. Force is a bit boring; God is a bit more exciting than that…
All God wishes is for me to be the best possible ‘me’ that is possible in the moment, embodying and manifesting Divine Love. To add Richard Rohr’s thinking here, God wishes us to participate in the Divine experience of Love, endlessly giving and endlessly receiving that Love, moment by moment. To turn all that has happened to the Good - now. When we choose to be our True Selves, dare to forego material things for true immanent connectedness, for Rohr, we can each of us become - in the ‘nowness of now’ - the hidden quadrant of the Trinity!

By markrdibben@gmail.com on 7th August 2020 - 15:15

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