If I Had A Hammer...
In the midst of writing a further memoir, more stuff about my past, I came to ask myself: “What is the present?” And the answer is… I don’t know.
We’ve all heard it said ‘Live in the present’ or some variation of same. The meaning most often is applied to someone who is seen to be either ‘living in’ the past or the future, and the advice basically means stop worrying about yesterday and/or tomorrow and just concentrate on today. In itself this seems good advice and most often probably is on a personal level. But as with most sayings, truisms or proverbs, there are assumptions within the concepts that can greatly alter the meaning of the phrase and therefore both the applicability and use of the words.
So, exactly what time frame gets me out of living in the past or the future and into living in the present?
Let’s start with you: What is your sense of ‘the present’? This exact moment? This morning? Today? This week, month, year, decade? I suspect like most things in life, while we feel that we share the same notion of the concept, when we come down to pin point what that notion actually is, it turns out to be rather hard to define, and far more varied between us than we had first imagined. Like ‘time’ itself; we all know what it means, but what is it, exactly?
For me, sometimes the ‘present’ seems to be thinner than a cigarette paper, constantly passing along between the future and the past; in effect, it doesn’t exist. If I try to grab at the exact ‘now’ it’s gone merely in the act of trying to grasp it. No matter how quickly I say ‘Now!’ it’s passed, and will be no matter how impossibly fast I or some super quantum computer can utter or formulate the word. This notion of an exact now, an exact present is illusory. Other times I wonder if my whole life isn’t my present? Sounds a bit like a fool and his semantics? Well yes, and no.
So what if my or your sense of the present, of what is immediately relevant to your life now, varies greatly? On one hand, is it possible to conceive of a present that encompasses our whole lives? On the other, in the sense of geological, universal time, our whole lives are less than fractions of fractions of the blink of an eye. OK, again so what you ask? Fair enough, probably hardly matters in most situations, but … and there is a ‘but’.
To take one example, compare the notion of place in time and space (location) between two different cultures. In Australian Aboriginal culture, the ‘Dreamtime’ links all of life as it is today into ‘one vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the great spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime’, which ‘continues as the "Dreaming" in the spiritual lives of aboriginal people today.’ (text within quotations marks from http://www.aboriginalart.com.au/cultu...). Powerful stuff, and something that clearly carries a deep and true sense that the ‘present’ is the same story as the ‘past’, and the future – one story, ongoing. Independent of whether you believe in this specific ‘Dreamtime’, the notion is cogent, real and as defensible as any other notion of our sense of time.
Then link this notion to that of land in the same cultural context: ‘We don't own the land, the land owns us' and 'Land is the starting point to where it all began. It is like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go' (quoted text from same source as above). So in a very real sense, both place in time and place in space are relevant at every point, not just here, not just now.
Those of us who live in the techno-land of rapid changes and affluent, benign neglect (yep, that’s me) appear to be focused so sharply on the right here and the right now that our sense of the present (and the ‘here’) borders on the myopic. ‘Live in the present’ in this context is perhaps exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Or at least, our sense of the present should include all our connections, all our influences, at all times… which seems to me to resonate more with the underlying philosophy and world view of the Indigenous ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘sense of place’ than it does to Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat and Instagram.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any tools we fashion and use, but it would do us well, I believe, to remember another saying: ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
Just saying. : )
We’ve all heard it said ‘Live in the present’ or some variation of same. The meaning most often is applied to someone who is seen to be either ‘living in’ the past or the future, and the advice basically means stop worrying about yesterday and/or tomorrow and just concentrate on today. In itself this seems good advice and most often probably is on a personal level. But as with most sayings, truisms or proverbs, there are assumptions within the concepts that can greatly alter the meaning of the phrase and therefore both the applicability and use of the words.
So, exactly what time frame gets me out of living in the past or the future and into living in the present?
Let’s start with you: What is your sense of ‘the present’? This exact moment? This morning? Today? This week, month, year, decade? I suspect like most things in life, while we feel that we share the same notion of the concept, when we come down to pin point what that notion actually is, it turns out to be rather hard to define, and far more varied between us than we had first imagined. Like ‘time’ itself; we all know what it means, but what is it, exactly?
For me, sometimes the ‘present’ seems to be thinner than a cigarette paper, constantly passing along between the future and the past; in effect, it doesn’t exist. If I try to grab at the exact ‘now’ it’s gone merely in the act of trying to grasp it. No matter how quickly I say ‘Now!’ it’s passed, and will be no matter how impossibly fast I or some super quantum computer can utter or formulate the word. This notion of an exact now, an exact present is illusory. Other times I wonder if my whole life isn’t my present? Sounds a bit like a fool and his semantics? Well yes, and no.
So what if my or your sense of the present, of what is immediately relevant to your life now, varies greatly? On one hand, is it possible to conceive of a present that encompasses our whole lives? On the other, in the sense of geological, universal time, our whole lives are less than fractions of fractions of the blink of an eye. OK, again so what you ask? Fair enough, probably hardly matters in most situations, but … and there is a ‘but’.
To take one example, compare the notion of place in time and space (location) between two different cultures. In Australian Aboriginal culture, the ‘Dreamtime’ links all of life as it is today into ‘one vast unchanging network of relationships which can be traced to the great spirit ancestors of the Dreamtime’, which ‘continues as the "Dreaming" in the spiritual lives of aboriginal people today.’ (text within quotations marks from http://www.aboriginalart.com.au/cultu...). Powerful stuff, and something that clearly carries a deep and true sense that the ‘present’ is the same story as the ‘past’, and the future – one story, ongoing. Independent of whether you believe in this specific ‘Dreamtime’, the notion is cogent, real and as defensible as any other notion of our sense of time.
Then link this notion to that of land in the same cultural context: ‘We don't own the land, the land owns us' and 'Land is the starting point to where it all began. It is like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go' (quoted text from same source as above). So in a very real sense, both place in time and place in space are relevant at every point, not just here, not just now.
Those of us who live in the techno-land of rapid changes and affluent, benign neglect (yep, that’s me) appear to be focused so sharply on the right here and the right now that our sense of the present (and the ‘here’) borders on the myopic. ‘Live in the present’ in this context is perhaps exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. Or at least, our sense of the present should include all our connections, all our influences, at all times… which seems to me to resonate more with the underlying philosophy and world view of the Indigenous ‘Dreamtime’ and ‘sense of place’ than it does to Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat and Instagram.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any tools we fashion and use, but it would do us well, I believe, to remember another saying: ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.
Just saying. : )
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