Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t a moment in action.
And all those moments have had one thing in common, they were all now once.So if you think about it, you may picture life as a whole stack of
moments, like a stack of photographs that show what happens in your life
instant by instant. The present moment sits at the top, and past
moments extend down from there. New moments drop from above, as the
seconds tick by. That stack of moments is your life. Right?
Well, not really. There is no stack. If there were, you could just
lift a photo out of the middle and it would be as clear and vivid as the
one on top. You could sift through your past at will, and see every
detail just as if it were happening again. You could pick a moment from
way down in the stack, maybe your 21st birthday, and recall every
detail.
I barely remember my 7th birthday, I think. My mom actually made
us cupcakes instead of a cake that year, one for each kid. My guests’
cupcakes each had one candle, except mine had 7 because I was the
birthday girl. Of that I’m certain, but I sure couldn’t tell you what I
was wearing, or list all the kids who were there. I’ve got one or two
details rattling around in my memory, but the moment itself is gone.
Of course I have memories, but they are poor facsimiles of the moment
they are supposed to represent. Those memories are not a part of that
moment. They’re a part of this one, right now, where I’m
sitting in front of my computer . I cannot access my 7th birthday in any way; I’m stuck here. Now.There’s really only one picture, but it keeps changing. We can
remember when it looked different, but we can’t see its past
incarnations with anywhere near the clarity we can with the present one.So my 7th birthday is as dead as Bin Laden. This sounds kind of sad, but it’s actually fantastic news.
If the scope of life never extends beyond one moment, that means you never have to deal with more than one moment. You
can bring all your attention and resources to bear on making the
smartest move right now; there needn’t be any other considerations.
This means that there are not a million things to do, or a
million people to please. All you ever have to do is observe the moment
that is happening, and pick an action that makes sense to you.
It
often doesn’t seem like it, but life is always presented in these
convenient, manageable slices. The scope of your power as a person
cannot extend beyond this single moving snapshot, so there is no reason
to attempt to influence anything beyond it. Observe the moment, pick
what strikes you as a smart move, do it and watch what happens. That’s
the only responsibility you ever need to live up to. It encompasses
everything you can possibly do in life, so don’t kill yourself trying to
reach further than that.
You do not have to figure out your future, or come to terms with your
past, because there is no future or past. Any experiences that seem to
be from the past or future are not experiences at all, they are just thoughts. Those thoughts are all just features of the present moment.
Try this:
Hold your hands up, palms facing each other, one beside each ear.
Feel the heat radiating from your head, and get a sense of how small the
space is between your hands. It’s not much bigger than a basketball.
Every single thing you’ve ever experienced, every sour memory, every
embarrassment, every triumph, every great fear and every great hope, is
confined within the space between your hands. All conceptions or
visions of your past and future are right there floating above your
neck, and they cannot be found anywhere else. They have no weight of
their own, no permanence. They can take no form other than that of a
fleeting thought.
Rather than experiences, thoughts are more akin to a sudden noise:
they arise with a frightful clatter, and are just as suddenly gone,
leaving no trace. Unfortunately, the human mind has some
inefficiencies. The mind doesn’t automatically make a distinction between experiences and thoughts about experiences, regardless of whether those experiences are remembered, anticipated, or imagined.
If they are mistaken for the actual experiences they represent, the
person thinking them can react as such, with the same physical and
emotional distress they might have if they were actually
experiencing them. These physical responses can trigger other thoughts,
and the subsequent torrent of ‘noise’ can take on the appearance of a
whole lifetime of regrets and worries. They are still insubstantial
thoughts, but the physical and emotional reactions they trigger are
concrete and real. Simply recognizing thoughts as the phantom ruses
they are can halt this process before it happens.
Neither the future nor the past can ever be dealt with, and they don’t need to be.
You only need to deal with your present-moment thoughts about them.
When you are not having thoughts about those two realms of time, they
bear zero relevance to your life. You can safely let them go and feel
free to deal with the living moment at hand.This truth, once I fully understood it, released a huge weight
from around my neck. Life wasn’t crushing and heavy, it was as light
as air. Thin as a photograph. I was finally able to look into each
moment as if it were nothing more than an infinitely detailed and
poignant living picture. I could finally take the moments one at a
time, because I understood that there never was more than one. I could
appreciate and observe each one, and know that my whole life
lies within it, not just a tiny fraction. There are no ghastly fears
out there, stalking me from somewhere else, waiting to pounce. If they
existed, they’d be right here, in the picture for me to look at with the
rest of the scenery. Moments do hold me captive, and everything else does drop away. But they aren’t few and far between, they’re broadcast live, 24-7.
Moments can be observed with clarity, and can be navigated deftly, but our whole lives are
just too vast to be managed at all, no matter how strong or organized
we become. The crushing weight of one’s entire past is always too much
to bear, as is the frightful spectre of another forty or fifty years
rife with dilemmas and tragedies. It’s far too complex; there are too
many contingencies and unknowns. Surely something in there will
overwhelm or destroy us.
A human being just can’t deal with that, and often it feels like the
best we can do is distract ourselves from it. But we don’t need to.
We just have to recognize that there is no ‘out there’ at all. Life
is in right in front of you, all of it, always. And there isn’t any more
to it.
