No time in the present

There is something rum about the present moment. Fishy. Not right.

We are forever being told to live in it, as though it were a desirable neighbourhood or a particularly well-appointed condominium. Be here now, the self-help people insist. Pay attention. Stop worrying about tomorrow and stop brooding over yesterday.

Emily Dickinson: Forever is composed of nows.

Lao Tzu (in modern phrasing): If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

Marcus Aurelius: Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.

Enjoy the moment. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans and thinking that John Lennon came up this nugget of wisdom when in fact he cribbed it from a Mary Worth syndicated newspaper strip by Allen Saunders. (I’m going to guess that where Lennon actually came across it was in a 1958 Reader’s Digest “Quotable Quotes” compilation.)

The thing is, having earnestly endeavoured to follow all of this well-meaning and sagacious advice, I can report that the present moment is considerably less interesting than advertised. It tends to consist largely of filling out tax returns, changing duvet covers and replacing toilet rolls on the holder.

Intense obliteration of the present tends to arrive without warning, usually while I am doing something unpleasant. I might be washing the car, for instance, when I suddenly remember an embarrassing conversation I had in 1987, or begin worrying about whether I have enough money to cover funeral expenses.

The car continues to collect soap suds, indifferent to my psychological development. But I have yet to meet anyone who, while scrubbing the hood of an automobile, has thought, What a magnificent privilege it is to be alive at this precise instant. More likely, they are wondering whether the acidic seagull splatter on the roof will ever come off, or whether the neighbour is watching them work and silently judging their choice of sponge or chamois.

Human beings, it seems, have an almost supernatural ability to be somewhere other than where they are. We are either leaning forward into the future or turning around to inspect the past. The present, which is technically the only place in which we are alive, receives the least of our attention. We treat it like a foyer or a vestibule: somewhere to exist impatiently until something more interesting happens.

As children, we are particularly susceptible to this condition. We cannot wait to become older. We want to be tall enough to reach the kitchen cupboards, old enough to stay up late and sufficiently mature that no one will insist we put on mittens and galoshes.

Childhood is spent in a state of perpetual anticipation. Halloween is six months away, summer vacation two months away and adulthood an eternity away. We are forever looking forward to the next birthday, the next school year, the next opportunity to do something we are presently forbidden to do.

Then the wonderful world of adulting arrives and we discover that it is largely composed of errands and quandaries. There is no great unveiling. No one hands you a certificate announcing that you have finally become the person you imagined you would be.

Instead, you find yourself standing in a hardware store, unable to distinguish between two nearly identical varieties of caulking, wondering how it came to this. You have spent 30 years anticipating adulthood, and now that you are here, you would give almost anything to be eight years old again, provided you could retain your current understanding of compound interest.

Fifty years further down the road, you are once again forbidden from leaving the house without mittens and galoshes.

Our predilection for abandoning the present in favour of either the past or the future was beautifully identified by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure. In Act 3, Scene 1, the Duke of Vienna, disguised as a friar, offers Claudio a meditation on human mortality. Among the more remarkable lines is his description of life:

Thou hast nor youth, nor age;

But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep,

Dreaming on both.

It is an extraordinary image. Life, the Duke suggests, is neither quite youth nor quite old age, but something suspended between the two, like the peculiar half-consciousness that follows a substantial midday meal. We are not fully awake, nor are we entirely asleep. We dream about what has happened and what is yet to come, while the actual business of living passes us by.

Canonical critic Samuel Johnson, in his commentary on this passage, recognized the precision of Shakespeare’s observation. He wrote:

This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding time, and miss the gratifications that are before us; when we are old we amuse the languor of age with the recollection of youthful pleasures or performances; so that our life, of which no part is filled with the business of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner, when the events of the morning are mingled with the designs of the evening.

Johnson has managed, in a single paragraph tossed off in his celebrated edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1765, to explain practically the entire history of human dissatisfaction.

There is also something delightfully revealing about the reference to dinner. In Shakespeare’s and Johnson’s day — and those of most Canadians who came of age half a century ago — dinner was generally eaten around noon. What many today would refer to instead as lunch, reserving “dinner” for what we used to call supper, was therefore the occasion for this philosophical torpor.

The modern office worker, eating a turkey sandwich at 12:37 p.m. while reviewing next month’s budget and remembering an unfortunate performance review from 2019, is participating in precisely the same human tradition. We have changed the furniture, the menu and the terminology, but not the underlying mental disorder.

Consider the average lunch break. You sit down with the intention of enjoying a sandwich. Before taking the first bite, you remember that you forgot to answer an email. Then you wonder whether your dentist’s appointment next Thursday conflicts with a meeting. You recall something your father said to you when you were 16, which leads you to wonder whether you have adequately appreciated your parents. You check your phone.

Someone has posted photographs from a holiday trip you didn’t take. You begin thinking about your own next vacation, which reminds you that your passport expires in two years. By the time you have completed this extraordinary journey through the decades, your sandwich is gone.

You have eaten lunch, but you have not experienced it.

The problem becomes more pronounced with age. In youth, we are too busy imagining the future to enjoy the present. In old age, we become historians of ourselves. We look backward with the devotion of archivists, retrieving old victories, old romances, old friendships and old humiliations. We remember the time we danced until four in the morning, although we now regard a dinner reservation at 5:30 as an act of extraordinary courage.

We also become increasingly selective in our recollections. The past improves with every telling. Former apartments become charming, former jobs become stimulating and former romantic partners either become people with whom we were almost certainly happier than we realized at the time or people we should have recognized as abusive narcissists right from the first flirtatious glance.

We forget the plumbing, the office politics and the fact that the romantic partner in question once accused us of having the emotional range of a damp dishcloth.

Memory is an ingenious public-relations department. It often takes a miserable experience, removes the unpleasant details, adds flattering lighting and sends it back to us as nostalgia.

People of a certain age are especially fond of saying, “Remember when we used to …?” This is generally followed by a description of an activity that, at the time, they found exhausting, inconvenient or mildly humiliating. Remember when we used to drive all night? Remember when we could eat whatever we wanted? Remember when we didn’t need reading glasses? Remember when we could get out of a low chair without making a sound formerly associated with the opening of a wooden stagecoach crate on Gunsmoke?

We remember these things as though they were privileges rather than circumstances we failed to appreciate.

The future, meanwhile, is no less treacherous. It is a vast imaginary country in which we expect to become organized, exercise regularly, eat sensibly, read the books we have purchased and finally deal with the mysterious drawer in the kitchen containing expired batteries, rubber bands and a key that may or may not belong to a metal tool shed that collapsed in the great Ice Storm of 1998.

In the future, we are magnificent. In the future, we will be disciplined and attentive. We will write thoughtful letters, call our friends and remember birthdays without relying on Facebook. We will be patient with difficult people and generous toward strangers. We will not waste time. We will not become irritated by apparently blind drivers older than Methusela. We will not stand in the kitchen eating cheese directly from the refrigerator at 2 a.m. while wondering why we are not losing weight.

The future version of ourselves is an extraordinarily accomplished individual. Unfortunately, he or she never seems to arrive. There is always another tomorrow in which all these improvements can begin.

I have occasionally tried to impose order on this situation by making lists. Lists are reassuring because they give the impression that life is manageable. A list transforms the sprawling disorder of existence into a series of numbered obligations. Unfortunately, making the list frequently becomes a substitute for doing the things on it. I can spend an entire morning organizing the afternoon’s activities, only to discover at 2:15 that I have accomplished nothing except the organization of the morning. Oh, and also that we’re out of cheese. Please remind me to make a note of this.

There is something piously devout about this faith in the future. We believe that somewhere ahead of us lies a time when we will finally be ready to live. We will have fewer responsibilities, more money, better health and a clearer understanding of what matters. We will be free to enjoy ourselves once we have finished preparing to enjoy ourselves.

Of course, this is rather like refusing to get into a swimming pool until you have learned to swim.

The most depressing aspect of the whole business is that we are perfectly capable of recognizing what we are doing. We know that childhood passes quickly. We know that our parents will not be around forever. We know that friends move away, children grow up and the people we love become older. We understand, intellectually, that the present is fleeting.

Yet somehow this knowledge does not make us more attentive. Instead, it gives us one more thing to worry about in the future and one more thing to feel nostalgic about in the past.

Even our attempts to enjoy the present can become exercises in prospective regret. We take photographs of sunsets rather than watching them, because we want to be able to remember them later. Then we consign the real clouds to a cyber cloud and never look at them again.

We interrupt conversations to check whether someone has sent us a message. We go on vacations and spend half the time planning what we will do when we return. We sit beside a beautiful lake and wonder whether the property taxes on the cottage across the water are excessive.

We are so determined to preserve our experiences that we regularly fail to have them.

Perhaps this is what makes the Bard’s image of the after-dinner sleep so enduring. It is not simply that we are distracted. We are divided against time itself. We cannot quite inhabit the stage of life in which we find ourselves. Youth is preoccupied with becoming old enough; age is preoccupied with having once been young enough. The middle years are spent trying to finance both.

And there we sit, somewhere between the morning’s events and the evening’s designs, dreaming on both.

There may be no cure. The mere fact that Shakespeare was writing about this in 1604, shortly after King James I had ascended to the English throne, proves that there’s nothing new about this universal tendency. It’s hardwired into the human brain.

The essence of Eastern philosophy is an admonition attributed to the historical Buddha in the Bhaddekaratta Sutta, the oral traditions of which date from the 5th Century BCE: “You shouldn’t chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind; the future is as yet unreached. Whatever state is present right here, discover insight into it right there.”

I suspect, however, that even if we were raised as Buddhist monks and schooled in the ability to live entirely in the present, most of us boisterous bhikkhus would find the experience intolerable. We would begin wondering what we were missing beyond the austerities and companionship of the Sangha. We would ask whether the present was being properly used, whether we were enjoying it enough, whether there might be a better present available somewhere else.

It’s easy to imagine a person sitting quietly in a monastery garden, determined to live in the moment, when suddenly a thought occurs: I should really be enjoying this more than I am. I wonder what’s on Crave.

And just like that, the moment is gone.

Whenever I turn off my mind, relax and float downstream — another line salted away and later replicated by Lennon for the song “Tomorrow Never Knows”; it’s from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner — I inevitably wind up back in the vortex of the famous concluding line from the poem “pity this busy monster, manukind” by e.e. cummings:

listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go

And I do.

There’s an affecting scene in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop in which the child heroine, Little Nell, explores an Anglican graveyard early one morning by herself:

It was a very quiet place, as such a place should be, save for the cawing of the rooks who had built their nests among the branches of some tall old trees, and were calling to one another, high up in the air. First, one sleek bird, hovering near his ragged house as it swung and dangled in the wind, uttered his hoarse cry, quite by chance as it would seem, and in a sober tone as though he were but talking to himself. Another answered, and he called again, but louder than before; then another spoke and then another; and each time the first, aggravated by contradiction, insisted on his case more strongly. Other voices, silent till now, struck in from boughs lower down and higher up and midway, and to the right and left, and from the tree-tops; and others, arriving hastily from the grey church turrets and old belfry window, joined the clamour which rose and fell, and swelled and dropped again, and still went on; and all this noisy contention amidst a skimming to and fro, and lighting on fresh branches, and frequent change of place, which satirised the old restlessness of those who lay so still beneath the moss and turf below, and the strife in which they had worn away their lives.

Now maybe those who lay beneath the moss and turf below are having a six-feet deeper experience, fixed as they are on the eternal present, the fount of the everlasting moment. But I’ll bet the rooks (Eurasian members of the crow family) are having a more interesting one, strife notwithstanding.

As British essayist Erich Heller perceptively wrote of Goethe’s outrageous depiction of a legendarily dissatisfied scholar: “What is Faust’s sin? Restlessness. What is Faust’s salvation? Restlessness.”

Faust was certainly no everyman, but what did he share with the rest of us? His sin and his salvation.

Still, it can’t be gainsaid that there is something to be said for trying to live in the moment as best we can. And perhaps the best we can manage is to recognize our habitual departures and occasionally return our focus to the present. To eat the sandwich while it is still a sandwich. To listen to a friend without composing our response. To watch the sunset without immediately reaching for the selfie stick.

One day soon, we should all make a point of sitting down after lunch without making plans for the evening or reminiscing about the morning. I think it would be good for us. And we can all look back on this meditative experience over dessert while planning dinner and thinking about the time Maurice Chevalier stole the 1958 musical Gigi by winsomely crooning to Hermione Gingold: Ah, yes, I remember it well.