Living in the "NOW"

Living in the “NOW”

She tells me I should Live in the “Now”. Not in the past, not in the future. The future does not exist and the past is already gone and there is nothing you can do about it. But what does it mean to live in the now?

She says that when you live in the now, you are conscious of every passing thing in your life. Well, what’s new about this?! Nothing really. I always thought that we must be conscious of every passing moment to feel alive. However, it seems to go beyond that….

For instance, like most people, I daydream. I do. It is not a helluva lot of daydreaming but I take myself out of my PRESENT life, and I become part of a dream. It is momentary and it is only a thought, sometimes as fast as a flash of lightning. I become someone like me, but nevertheless, it is somebody else. There, I posses all of my qualities, but they all seem more clear, more agile, more heightened. I have no doubts in this persona, since it is one-dimensional and it deals solely with that aspect of my daydreaming. There are no other me there taking attention from this persona.

As usual I asked myself what’s wrong with this, and as usual I would conclude that nothing is wrong with a little daydreaming. However, she says that this daydreaming “is THE, or one of THE reasons why it hasn’t yet happened to me”, meaning that my real dreams, my real future, or where I subconsciously want to be has not come to being in my life.

She claims that my energies are wasted in non-real ventures which are predicated on an improbable future. She also tells me that I avoid focusing on what THE, (or more possible MY), problems are, by concentrating in activities that make me be on an ON-HOLD mode.

Wow, she really pisses my off!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, what do I have to say about that? I don’t know, but it makes me think, it makes me ask myself what’s really wrong with me. These questions are a bit difficult to address sometimes. These are the dreadful times when we need to start evaluating our lives, our goals and our accomplishments or lack of.

So my first instinct is to hate her, or better yet to attack her reasoning, her credibility. I try to verify the essence of her beliefs as simple concepts, human ideas, non-proven ideas. I think that I do a good job of it. I don’t always know that I am attacking someone. To me it is instinctual. I need to know who is questioning me, who is attacking my being, my actions or inactions. I could go on about how time is a human invention that it was needed to put every idea into our finite frame of understanding. I would speak of the present not existing, since it is like a laser light, burning a moving surface in consecutive points that define a line or a curve of some type, and therefore there is no present, because at the time you fix on it, it vanishes into it’s past. Also, I would mention that the eye with which we see the present is always tinted by our past experiences, and that these experiences form a part of the past, but whose past??, our personal past??, our collective past?? If a tree felt into the forest and there was no one there to see it for a long, long time, the tree disintegrated and became something else did it exist?? Do we exist if nobody alive could corroborate our existence?? Then again who spends life conscious of every split second, every object, every smell, every individual routinely experience? Who is so conceited that would believe that his life is so important?? Does the fact that I make this question make me seem like I have very low self esteem??
There you have the concept of the present pretty much running for cover to regroup and come back with new arguments from her.

ACD
9.19.06