Being in the Moment

Like any other creative enterprise, writing is a way to capture, amplify, comment on, analyze, criticize, and appreciate human experience. All art strives, in some manner, to express feelings and desires, but each form has its own special power. Music, for example, can strongly convey mood. Visual media can evoke a sense of illusionary reality so effectively that it can trigger terror or delight. And writing has a unique capability to distill, clarify, and preserve complex emotions and abstractions.

Imagine a small group of people standing at a scenic overlook. The tide crashes against the cliffs below; the sun dips below the western horizon amidst an uproar of vermillion, tangerine, and rose. The trees flanking them reach for the sky with gnarled branches, bristling with needles and pinecones, sturdy trunks resisting the sea wind with a tangled network of roots plunging into the rocky crevices.

Each of the observers processes this moment in a different way. One is sitting in front of a canvas on an easel, painting. Another is taking pictures with a film camera from the 1960s. Another has a sketchbook, and is using charcoal pencils to render one particular tree that caught her eye. Someone is using an ink pen to compose a poem in a spiral-bound notepad. And one is just standing there, taking it all in.

The one person who is just standing there is not necessarily any more or less engaged in the experience than the painter, the photographer, the sketch artist, or the poet. In fact, who knows? He might be zoning out, thinking about something else entirely, not really present at all. There is no intrinsic virtue in doing nothing. Doing nothing is also not inherently bad; by standing there in quiet meditation, perhaps that person in more intensely focused on the fleeting beauty of this time and place than anyone else at the overlook.

But there is another person there, too. That person has a phone, and is alternately taking pictures and typing.

There is perhaps an instantaneous impulse to judge that person for paying attention to a phone instead of paying attention to the sunset. But is taking a picture with a phone any different than taking a picture with a vintage Franke & Heidecke 35-mm Rolleiflex? And maybe what that person is typing is an essay or a sonnet, or field notes. Let’s not jump to the conclusion that this person is playing Minecraft and ignoring the splendor of the natural world.

There are as many different ways to participate in life as there are intelligent beings on the planet, and they are all valid. When somebody says, “I wasn’t taking pictures, I was just being in the moment,” that negates the value of taking pictures as a means to be in the moment. When someone says, “put down your notepad and just pay attention to what’s happening right in front of you right now,” that refutes the usefulness of writing as a way to tangibly snare an ephemeral state in the careening flux of human existence.

Perhaps we would all be better off if we could find it within ourselves to do less judging and more living—whatever “living” means to each of us.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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