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The Poignancy of the Now
I was re-watching the DVD of the movie "Waking Life" last night. It's an odd
flick, an animation over film, in which the main character ends up caught in a
dream (or dead - one character in the film says that death is an endless dream
from which you can neither awake nor return to your body.)
In one scene, a woman describes picking up a picture of herself as a child,
and saying "That's me!" In order to do this, the person with the picture has to
tell a story. "I was born, and I lived here and moved there and grew up to
become me."
Except that story is a convenient fiction.
There is no other you than the you that is reading this sentence right now.
There is no other moment than this moment, and that has been true since the
beginning of time. In fact, as Einstein proved with his Theory of Relativity,
even time is a convenient yet unreal construct. We live in what philosophers
call "The Eternal Now." (see esp. Eckhart Tolle's books. )
One "proof" of the relative elasticity of time is the dream state. You wake
up at 8 am. You fall back asleep and have a rich, detailed dream of an entire
day. You wake up, and it's 8:03.
In the "real" world, we've been distracted, and time flew by, or we've waited
by the phone for news and time dragged. Time, in this sense, is an artificial
construct.
The reason this is important is that, without discipline, most people spend
their lives immersed in the stories in their heads, and those stories point in
one of two ways - past or future. Past stories are often "regret" stories, and
future stories are often "catastrophe" stories. Both are used by us to create
"drama and meaning" for our lives.
Now, I want to differentiate this kind of "pain-based" thinking from having
an active fantasy life. Nothing wrong with my setting aside some time to imagine
living in a tropical paradise, having sex with everyone I've ever fantasized
about. I just don't want to confuse this with "reality."
The only "reality" I can ever know exists moment by moment. The only way I
can know it is to be present in it. If I am sitting with you and thinking about
something other than sitting attentively with you - if I'm thinking about what I
had for dinner last night or what you really meant by something I think I
remember you saying - I am no longer present with you. I have decided that
what's going on in my head - the stories and dramas I'm telling myself - are
more important (in a sense, more "real") than you.
I set up an experience for a couple recently. They'd been fighting about
stuff, repeatedly, for years. Rather than rehash the past, I asked them to shift
focus and state their present intention for the relationship, and asked the
other person to simply listen. After each stated their intention, their partner
responded, "I didn't know you thought that!"
Which is sort of true. More clearly stated, it's "I was so busy up in my
head, making you the bad guy, and then supporting my stance with memories I
created, that I was unaware of you. I chose only to hear what would support my
preconceived notion that you are a jerk."
The poignancy of the now is the somewhat rueful realization that I am simply
who I am in this moment, and who and how I "register" who I am in this moment is
based entirely on how I have interpreted each of my experiences. (And this
experience. And this experience. Until you die.) It also means that, if I don't
like who I am in this moment, I can change my interpretations - the story I'm
telling myself, right now.
Thus, in the above client illustration, the shift came as each actively
listened - as they listened, they added to (changed) the story each was telling
him or herself. This happened, as does all of life, in the moment, and has
absolutely nothing to do with past experience or future expectation.
Each life is lived moment by moment, choice by choice. The past rolls up
behind us (like the Langoliers roll up time in Stephen King's Four Past
Midnight) and the future never is.
In other words, you have no future. Me either. All you ever have is this
moment. This is why waiting for something to happen in the future ("and then
I'll be happy!") is so stupid. Happiness, like everything else, is a
moment-by-moment choice, not a future destination.
Another example: take the life of a significant person, say FDR. He's dead.
So, we tell his story to remember. Except that you can read 30 biographies, and
get 30 versions of FDR. If you read his autobiography, you get another, equally
strange story. The story we tell about others is just as subjective as the story
we tell about ourselves. There is not one ‘true' story about any person,
including you. The person is the person, and that person lived one moment at a
time. The person doesn't actually exist as an entity from birth to death. All
that exists is moment-by-moment choice, moment-by-moment experience.
Yet another example: Now, admittedly, I have an internal representation of
Dar. It's based upon my experiences with her, since 1982. Except I've only been
in her physical presence a fraction of that time. (She's at work, she's away,
she's asleep.) In a sense, I know of her, without knowing her. And what I know
of her is totally about my interpretation of what I think I saw her "do." The
Dar in my head is the sum total of my explanations of my experiences with Dar.
It's just not Dar.
So, I have certain expectations and presuppositions regarding her, but no
assurances about any of it. We jokingly say we greet each other not by saying
"How are you today?" but rather by saying "Who are you today?" In the end, the
only "real" Dar is the one I can reach out and touch, in the here and now. The
rest of the stuff in my head is me, dressing up to look like Dar.
Each moment offers us a choice - will I play in my head with my
presuppositions, dramas, stories and pain, or will I be present? Am I brave
enough to understand that this moment is all the time I have with Dar, and is
all I will ever have with her? Everything else is a fiction designed to get me
past scaring myself about the impermanence of my life.
One point of "Waking Life" is captured in the title - one can choose to wake
up to life. Or, one can live forever trapped in a dreamscape, living a "life" of
"woulda, coulda, shoulda." In a hundred years, no one will remember your name.
No one, ever, will know you. Except, possibly, you. If you choose.
And the only you that you can know is the ‘you' that you are in this moment.
You are not your past - all you have is a present explanation of the story you
tell yourself about what you believe happened to you. In other words, you
experience your past NOW and only now.
You are nothing more than this moment, this breath. In this moment, you can
be fully alive and fully present. And in that choice, you are whole, complete
and without blemish.
Authentic, enlightened humanity exists only in The Eternal Now.
Wake Up!
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