In our workaday world, the past occurs from any time after this moment, stretching back hours, days, weeks, years, and centuries. We are trained and taught in school that there are important dates, important events, that supposedly are significant to remember, and that these are the things that constitute The Past.
Who we knew, who we grew up with, the history of ourselves, the historical dates of major events last year and centuries ago, all swirl about in our brains to form The Past, like shelves of boxes all haphazardly piled up upon each other in a dusty hall closet, waiting to fall upon each other and us should we peer in too closely and nudge even one of them.
And The Future? An avalanche of fears and trepidations just out of sight, soon to creep up on us, ready to catch us unprepared regardless of how much anticipatory distress we have mustered. Despite all the depravations we unhappily collect and unwillingly expect, losses we cringe from, and horrors we can pre-inflict upon ourselves, nothing can compare with the actual essence of tragedies we hurl ourselves into by not knowing our future.
An analogy
In large cities, often buildings are so close together that there is no space between them. This is common. Or there is so little space that nothing fits between them except perhaps a thin shaft of light.
That is how we live our lives. The past is so large upon us, like huge immoveable city buildings, and the future is as equally large, that the present is barely anything but the narrowest glimmer of light, so easy to miss unless we position ourselves properly, if only for a brief moment.
The past, its history, and the meanings we assign to it, the influences and the burden they impose upon us, takes up so much room in our heads, in our minds, that often we think nothing else all day except about things that happened in the past.
Then there are the massive strains of the future, our fears, our hopes, expectations, terrors, all make up the future, looming in the unknown but imminent future, that we can consume ourselves in preparation for a something we cannot see.
We are crushed between the two, between the past and the future. So much so that we have no present.
So the present, which is either squeezed out entirely, or a narrowest wisp of light, is so fleeting and gone in the next moment, that we have have lost it entirely. That is how we live.
Another way?
We can look at it another way. Looking from a different vantage point with the understanding that the present is not that single passing glimmer of light wedged between the enormities of the past and the future.
The present encompasses the past, and that middle light, and the future.
The present includes the past, includes all that is strewn about from history’s antiquity until and including today’s light. The present includes that light and the future in all of its unknowable concealments. The present includes the past and future because they are in our minds in every moment.
I think it best to repeat that last point:
The present includes the past and future because they are in our minds in every moment.
Until now, our every present moment has been enslaved with all the pasts that ever were, and is tormented by all future that will be.
But once we see that the present includes the past and the future, that we carry the past and future with us at every moment, then we have a chance to find an opening between the past and future, and the light expands, widens, opens, and we can actually begin to live, live in the present.
With this expanded view, the present becomes an ever-expanding vista that is as wide as we allow it, that is as deep and as far as we desire to know about. Turning to the left, the past recedes gracefully; turning to the right, the future is enveloped in a mist of the unknown; but here in this moment is the entirety of everything.
Not only does the present become wider, but the past is reduced in size and influence, and the future is reduced in its size and influence. They may still exist, but are not the overwhelming monoliths that control our lives as they had previously, they are reduced.
So, then, our present can expand to include our entire life.
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Starfish from the waters around Indonesia, collected during the Siboga Expedition, 1899–1900 by Ludwig Heinrich Philipp Döderlein (1855–1936), a German zoologist.
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