On The Puzzle of Time
And why it’s so difficult to live in the present
I have never been good at living in the present. And we’ve been led to believe that this is a failure of some sort, right?
We are supposed to relish the immediate, to enjoy our current state, and experience each moment as it unfolds. We should be thankful for all that is around us and all that we have. So shouldn’t this be easy to do?
But maybe it is only ‘easy’ to do if we have come to terms with our past, mollified our regrets, and learned how to handle our fears about the future. And, well, that is not so easy.
On ‘Living in the Past’
Time has always been a puzzlement: even philosophers cannot agree on what it is. We can measure it, surely, but it almost always seems to be an illusion — or at least an inconsistent thing, vanishing at times and dragging on at others.
Does it really exist? ‘No, it’s all relative’, some might observe. They say it’s linear… but we often feel that it comes and goes, and even jumps around. It can be unsettling, and we often want it to settle down, as if it would feel more secure that way.
It seems that the question of time has something to do with the question of security.
Indeed, I’ve spent much of my life wanting to hold on to the past. Even as a child, I was doubtful about growing up — which is odd, I suppose. When my parents would try to teach me new things, I didn’t want to listen. “Tell me that when I’m older”, I would say; I don’t want to have to know it now. I’m not ready.
For most, surely, isn’t it the opposite? As children, we want to grow up and do what the older ones do — to stay up later, to learn how to drive, to have a beer, or to leave for university. Anything but to be stuck where we are: the present will just never be enough for the present moment. If this is what living in the present is like, well, it doesn’t seem to be much fun.
Maybe the future will bring more potential? Perhaps… we will see.
Uncertainty
But maybe as we become older, we bring that yearning along with us, unnoticed. And then we try and see whether it is fulfilled right now, in the present, but the problem is that it often isn’t.
Instead, we are daunted by the uncertainty that lies ahead — which we had not expected back then when we were young — and which looms even larger than anyone could have foretold. The layout of the forward path had seemed like it would be easier than this… but alas, it got more complicated, with unexpected forks in it. We can’t help but yearn, then, for those younger days… when the future had its pristine promise and its innocence, and when the burden of duty lay far ahead; when we could see what the day brought without bearing its consequence. We had fun, and curiosity came along for the ride.
So we long to return to that time when, shielded from the misfortunes of the world, we always lived in the moment — because we didn’t know any other. We didn’t have to be anyone, back then. We could wing it, and just be who we were…
Or so it seems, in retrospect. Perhaps we need to remember the past that way, as this haven of nostalgia, where things remain just as we like to think they were.
French philosopher Henri Bergson observed that recollection is not the representation of something that was: the past is that in which we put ourselves in order to recollect ourselves, to feel a certain way and to find one’s place there.
But why do we want it to be this certain way? Well, that often has to do with what is going on now.
From Present Past to Past Present
I have often felt that I was never good enough for what I thought I needed to be. I know that this is an unfair attitude, a judgement made in haste and bitten with fear, but at these moments, I look for something — anything but the unknown that lies ahead. I find myself longing to go back to those earlier times, when I had felt safe. That present, at that time in the past, had been lived through and had become something known; it shows itself, now, as something I know I could handle, because I already had.
If I think about it, I can almost realize that I am using “the past” as a refuge for how I feel in the present, which is often unclear. Living in the now is so undefined, but at these times it seems to include this retrieval of the past.
But it is also clear that this remedy is an incomplete recollection, which would have included, too, all of those things I don’t want to recall: fears, embarrassments, regrets… losses, heartbreak and pain. And all those many times when I felt that I might never be good enough, which is just the thing that I tend to feel now, in the present.
It seems that this feeling I have is an echo, a re-experience, of what I had felt long ago. And maybe this happens more often than we would like to think. Putting the past in its place, then, is not such a simple matter after all, especially when it doesn’t want to stay there…
Interludes
Time comes and goes. It picks up or slows down in ways that are hard to figure, and whole sweeps of time may extend or almost vanish, for reasons that often stay out of reach.
Sometimes time extends for far too long. It can drag on and on and on… like the endless tick tick tick of the clocks from long ago. Now the red numbers just stare silently, stronger for all their oppression.
Weeks, months — seasons even — may linger tediously, as we wish, ongoingly, for something to change. For the cold portent of autumn, the warm nights of winter, the burgeon of spring and the indolence of summer. Now, now, now.
I realized that I pass a lot of time in these in-between moments, undefined. Waiting, it seems — but for what? For someone? Or something?
And the great problem is that waiting, as such, never really gets any easier. We wait, and wait, and finally… a reprieve, a change. Some sort of answer.
But how do we work out how to wait, in those moments? Sometimes you just have to take your mind off whatever it might be that you yearn for.
So, as for living in those moments? It’s often too painful to stay there…
Toward Present Future
If I am to stay in the present, then, I may need some help — a refuge, even, here, in the present. Some safe place to wander in — a green meadow, if you will, free from urgency.
Indeed, even more than in moments of distress, it is in moments of waiting that we may feel empty and alone. It seems like something is missing, as if we find ourselves to be empty shells of what we had thought we were, and that we still could be. In those moments, we call to mind something to hope for, something to soothe us and to bring us comfort… just like the past had done. Those hopes are notable for their promise, as they fill the current gaps with intended images, full of potential. We tailor them precisely as we want, to represent what our life might be like, going forward.
Living in the moment of the maybe so, one could say.
But looking towards the future in this way also seems to remove us from the present, just as our longing for the past had done. And yet, we don’t seem to be able to avoid these unintended digressions, which feel necessary, in the present moment, for reasons we can’t really fathom. The present, then, is interspersed with these imported moments of past and future, despite our best resolve to remain simply present.
What are we to do, then? Perhaps a luminous awareness would help, whereby we could see, and know, exactly what is going on. But that, of course, is easier said than done. Wouldn’t one have to understand something of the conditions of one’s own presence, as someone who navigates through life, carrying the past and anticipating the unknown future?
Indeed, philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that our tending towards the future is inevitably uncertain, and necessarily accompanied by uncomfortable feelings. What he calls ‘authenticity’ would entail working out how to endure these experiences, right now, in the present. Only then could we prepare ourselves so that the future can unfold with our being present in it.
The Takeaway
Transitions — those in-between moments of pure indeterminacy — have always made me uncomfortable, as the predictable situation gives way to something I don’t yet know. What is more, in those moments I never know where I want to be, or really who I am to be. It is often scary, and so I feel only what I could: the need to not be there, in that place, in that moment. Forwards? Backwards?… Just not here. Not now.
Over time, I have learned to abide these moments of incertitude, at least somewhat, and to realize that the greatest difficulty comes from within. Indeed, as philosopher G.W.F Hegel had noted concerning the great figures of literature,
“they are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own being…”
Even if my something does not reach such tragic proportions, it is, however, intrinsic to me. But, of course, it’s often quite obscure what it is that is intrinsic to me. One has to be open to its discovery, in the course of time.
I’ve learned that sometimes I yearn for the past — perhaps because I fear that it is going to disappear…like promises to ‘stay in touch’ that fail to echo. I mourn that part of the past that I have lost, that version of myself that I used to be. It is almost as if those experiences, fallen into memory, are no longer fully mine.
But the fact is that no one but I, myself, can take my past from me: these are my experiences, my memories and cherished moments. I must learn that they cannot possibly have vanished altogether: they must lie, lingering, deep in me, somewhere, subliminally. They take part in shaping me, somehow, even now.
But if I leave them, there, in the mere shadow of the subliminal, aren’t they then more likely to have me than I am to have them?
The only solution, then, would be to bring them along into the present, more clearly: to see them as additions to my present moment, not something that remains missing, lost in the depths of time. Something gained, not something gone.
Perhaps, thereby, one can, like Proust, go ‘in search of lost time’, and find that being in the moment unfolds as a union in which past, present, and future are all there, simultaneously, to be discovered.
