Grasping Time

"Forward is the way!" we hear. As if there were any other options. Time does not turn back, the present does not regress, and the future does not recede. We have no choice when it comes to the path. The signposts can be - and are - various, if we believe in free will, but, with each step we take, our previous footprint disappears, it becomes only imagined. Behind us, nothing, a cliff. Did we really walked from behind? It doesn't matter, but that step brought us here.



But it is what brought us here... "In the present we live the consequences of the past", "the future is the fruit of the present", "with every action, a reaction", and the chain, like this, doesn't break, it just goes forward, forward, forward... And thinking about this scares us, because what we were a second ago, we will never be again. What we are now, we are now and only now. What does this mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing at all - for some - maybe these are absurd, unimportant worries, a consequence (once again) of those who sowed these thoughts and are now reaping them. I'm sure some people don't care. "Live in the moment," the poems say. "Tomorrow doesn't matter," the love letters say. But then, what if we still exist next, in the second after that moment? What if we live tomorrow, in the future of now? Won't it matter what we did today? Won't it even be determinant? And if living in the moment is the solution, how can we "live in the moment" if we have memory? I am not saying that it is impossible not to think about what is coming, but is it possible not to think about what happened if we remember? How can we follow Carpe Diem if nothing previously determined it?

We may very strongly want to be completely independent of what we have been, but how can this be possible? Even if we chose to go on a very long retreat, away from everything and everyone, going so far as to forget our own identity, we would still be no more than ourselves and the sequence of events that had brought us to that very moment, including the prolonged meditative retreat.

As such, I don't believe in the "live in the moment" and the "tomorrows don't matter." The tomorrows matter because we will live them, and I don't want to experience what I fear or seek, at all costs, to avoid. And "living in the moment" doesn't exist, because macroscopic randomness in a human being is neither real nor achievable. We are not the now, we are everything that came before and culminated here.

The solution to our prayers, desires, goals or objectives - whatever we want to call them - lies, therefore, not in despising the ticking of the clock, not in living as if time did not exist, but in having the conviction that, because it exists, we have to grasp it at all times. Right, maybe "having" is not the most appropriate verb to use - the sense of such a constant and, moreover, unlimited obligation until the end of our days, would bring with it a mind-blowing anxiety that would only disintegrate body from soul. Not "having" to grasp, we "have", at least, to "try" to do so from the moment we recognise that tomorrow we will be what we build today (with all the contextual/circumstantial interference, but we can't count on that, if we are not soothsayers). Grasping time... nothing more than enjoying the time we have knowing that we will never have it again. That is something that brings some pressure, but that doesn't have to be felt as a burden on our shoulders, but as a lever for achievement. Forward is the way, but that we already know. What the path is is yet to be defined. Now - each and every moment.