Time

Time is a funny thing. It seems to race relentlessly forward. We try so hard to stop it, expand it, knowing all too well how little we are given in the end. And yet, we can not help but almost ignore the present, the moment, which is nearly unidentifiable, unmeasurable. What's a moment? As soon as you start thinking about that question, it's already passed and belongs to the past. And then the future quickly becomes the present moment, and this just keeps repeating itself throughout our lives, while we so rarely manage to be part of our own present moment.

The last sentences of a book I read recently go like "Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it." Should be my new philosophy to live by. It's hard though. Earlier in the book, the protagonist says "Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years." I read this line like 20 times before I started to get a feel for it. I just hope that my present self would not be disappointed by how my future self turns out one day. Isn't that all we can hope for anyway?

Why is it easier to live in the past, or the future, for that matter? Maybe it's safer: past has no mystery to it, it's all done and decided, carved into memory - even though our brains alter our memories, the ultimate outcome is usually known. Our neuronal circuits make it possible for us to go back in time and relive past moments: perhaps the biggest gift and curse of the human intellect. Living in the future is also safe: I have complete control over the outcome. Whatever my imagination comes up with, that is the way "future" is, as imagined in the present. How much of our time is wasted while we are looking back into the memories, longing for something, someone at some time in the past, which we wish we could really recreate. How much time is wasted while we are trying to imagine our future, when all we need to do is to live fully in the present, which will then lead us into our future, with all its mysteries and unexpected twists and turns.

. . .

Just a couple of days ago, I was traveling. I had breakfast in Budapest, lunch in Warsaw, dinner somewhere over the Atlantic, suspended in space and time, and then a midnight snack in New York. It still seems strange to me how easy it is to do this in our time, to jump around in space like this, almost defying the laws of nature. Traveling West, you can expand your day by a few hours, make it last a little longer, seemingly stretching out the present. And during those hours, life seems to be on hold. Of course, it's not really like that, but I always have the eery feeling of somehow being outside of time during those long hours, not really progressing through my life. Maybe we're meant to be in the natural flow of time, perhaps that is how our brains are wired. I am always relieved being back on land, back in the flow of life, in which I can go forward.

And forward I go now, starting at this very moment, which has already passed.