Living in the now is impossible
As a conscious human being I respect and appreciate my place in my timeline. I have memories of the past, and can look back with sadness and joy at the events in my life: it’s part of being human and expressing our emotions.
I can look forward to the future yet I also understand that the future will hold some sadness in it. Sadness is inevitable and it’s just part of life.
The way we think about the past or future is up to us, which I hope is the entire point of a number of well-known authors and speakers in that we can invest our thoughts with as much or as little emotion as we wish.
We can blame ourselves for things that happened in the past, we can blame others for things that happened, we can blame everybody and everything and trot out our stories as to why things are the way they are today.
But they’re just stories and investing time and emotion in them does nobody any good.
Living in the now has become a catchphrase, and worse a platitude to make us feel good about ourselves, yet for many people it has merely added to our anxiety. It’s something else to ‘fail’ at.
Go to Facebook or Pinterest and witness the thousands of quotations around “being present”, all rushing past in a stream that we ultimately switch off.
Surely our time would be spent better gazing at the waves in the sea,
watching a child play or engaging in play?
According to research¹ at the university of Pittsburgh “living in the moment” may be impossible. The brain keeps track of decisions we make and compares these decisions to decisions we made in the past.
Why don’t we just live in the moment? For a healthy person, it’s impossible to live in the moment. It’s a nice thing to say in terms of seizing the day and enjoying life, but our inner lives and experiences are much richer than that. Marc Sommer, Ph.D
The brain thinks about thinking, which makes sense when you, er, think about it.
Worrying about the future or past in the hope that it will change is a fruitless exercise. People have always had a balance of mindfulness (similar to ‘flow’ as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would say) such as sitting by a fire and getting lost in the flames, creating art or craft or watching a sunset.
However, we also utilized out capabilities for forward planning: thinking about how we would obtain food for the day, thinking about finding shelter for the night or the long winter season coming upon us.
In part this is instinctual–like other animals–but also a choice exercise the human capacity to think and make use of our will to ensure some future event was brought into reality.
Even Buddha, a figure held up by many as a shining example of mindfulness or being in the moment would have lived out of the moment at times – perhaps many times.
In the flow state of extreme sport where massive environmental inputs are rushing in and being dealt with, the brain still uses past experience and goes: Tree = hard = bad thing to hit
Our inner lives and experiences are rich places: embrace your human-ness.
¹http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/08/10/why-we-cant-live-in-the-moment/42968.html
Image:Fred Mancosu Flickr Creative Commons