No Time Like The Present

“No time like the present, a thousand unforeseen circumstances may interrupt you at a future time” - a proverb from 1562, according to Google search results! I often think about time, temporarily accepting its parallel and uniform correlation with space and life within it, and very likely will do until someone else comes up with an alternative metaphysical hypothesis. If we accept time as the infinite and unwavering linear continuum that it appears to be then there will always be a past and future as distinct from the given moment of the present. We can think of our life as running along and occupying a segment of this infinite timeline.

Sometimes I get stuck. I do so on some past point on the timeline of my life. I then often find it difficult, sometimes debilitatingly so, to shift back to the present moment. People may offer words of sympathy like "don't worry, it's happened; it's in the past". Just about everyone I know has, to some extent, worried about things they have experienced in the past: "If only he, she, they, I, had thought, seen, behaved, done things differently, everything could have been so much better"; "If this, that, the other, had, hadn't happened, then this, that, the other could have happened". I spend a lot of time with my thoughts and feelings stuck in such black holes from which I struggle to break free.

Over the past three days or so I've been stuck on another segment of my timeline: the future. I recently experienced some difficulties with someone which have remained unresolved in my own mind. In seeking a resolution I have been thinking hard about different scenarios that might play out during my next encounter with the individual concerned. The thoughts are involuntary; I don't want to spend twenty-four hours a day thinking about a distressing situation and experiencing the anxiety that comes with it. But, despite being aware of this, the intrusive thoughts are stubborn. They won't shift or, if they do, it's not long before they're back with a vengeance. I find myself visualising an endless permutation of possible future scenarios: non-stop little daydreams that essentially form a continal video playback on loop mode; my mind has its own little YouTube built in. 

In a previous life as an actor I was an ardent devotee of something called Meisner technique. This teaches us to allow our full attention on what is happening right here and now, with others who are present, in the immediate surroundings. It means living moment-to-moment. Dwelling on past misfortunes and injustices or trying to visualise and unilaterally resolve potential future altercations and interactions, all of which are the product of anxiety induced thoughts, takes us away from living moment-to-moment. If we're somewhere else, we cannot engage with the here-and-now. If this is our default modus operandi it means that whenever we find ourselves on any future point on our timeline, we'll still be wallowing in the past or worrying about the future; we still won't be in the present.

If we're not in the here-and-now, here, and now, then we can't appreciate or authentically engage with it. If I'm in conversation with someone, but I am not with them, but in my own mind somewhere else on my timeline in a state of preoccupation, my lack of presence does us all a disservice. I might as well lump together all those moments of disconnected absence, shove them into a large bin bag, and chuck them out of the window of existential angst that I've created for myself.  By the way, it works both ways, not that you needed me to tell you that! I'd like to refine the proverb; I think I'd now like it to read: "no time like the present to live in the present, (moment-to-moment)" - proverb, 2023! In theory, at least, it sounds great; unfortunately though, my mind's YouTube seems to be resuming from pause; more work is clearly needed on the stop button.