There Is No Spoon- The blurring of time in the holiday spotlight

It’s the holidays, a natural time to think about life, one’s hopefully unusual place in it, how to avoid certain things and places and people, how to make sure to embrace others. I’m generally an outsider during this time of year and it suits me at this point, but I have to confess, I enjoy watching other people interact with their families. Here in the time of Covid, all the little differences seem bigger than usual. The commonalities and ties seem more vibrant, too. This is when you realize, if you remain objective, that a person is generally smeared through time. The present is a blurry point in the center of a cloud that is also comprised of the past and elements of the future. Think about it. Earlier today, you flashed back to the past several times. It’s the holidays. You were probably also thinking about the coming new year. Your very own ghosts of Christmas past and future were all around you. The exact moment you were in? Really dialing in on now? Only if you were cooking, driving, getting down, reading- doing something that required your immediate concentration.

This unfocused notion of time, it seems, it just a festive version of what happens all year long, and it has me thinking about mindfulness and what I get out of my garbled version of it. I’ve often felt like I was smeared through too much time. In a given day I had long episodes of reminiscing, back to things I’ve seen, places I’ve been, people I’ve known, many of them generally pleasant though not always, but all in association with whatever is in front of me, what I was doing or seeing or feeling right then. Linking now with the past until the two overlap in a comfortable or a questionably instructive way. Like everyone else, at three am these same reflections go dark, and I think about the villains I failed to identify until it was years too late, an old friend who died before I could say goodbye, the kid I was rude to in second grade, the jackass in the store I should have punched in the neck for doing something awful in front of me. The blurry margins of now also extend into the future- a deadline I felt confident about in the day seems unachievable in the dark hours, etc. We all do this. It occurs to me that in this way, a bad childhood can cling to you. An unsatisfactory marriage. Things that are over and done and unchangeable. The coming months of a crappy job or the current pandemic can bear down on you, even though that story is unwritten and the details subject to entropy. Dragging past and future non-now business into NOW makes little sense, and the less I do it the better I feel. Now, as in the present, outside of the individual (as in me and you) is an almost unreal time as it is. We’re in a pandemic that won’t end. We’re on the cusp on an actual space age with rockets galore. I just read that someone tried to entangle a tardigrade and a qubit. The future has intruded into now, largely because things are happening blindingly fast and getting even faster. Now is quite simply gnarly enough without all the clutter surrounding it. Give it a try, dear reader. For the next few hours, whenever the past or the future hits you, drag yourself back into the moment. Now is better than the low points in either temporal direction, not as good as the highlight reel, but most of the time it isn’t that bad at all. And it now sucks? Well, you know where to focus your energy.

New book and film news over at my website, http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com, as well as an updated contact page. Happy Holidays!