Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

by Daniel J. Levitin

The only thing you know for sure is the present tense. That nowness becomes so vivid to me now, that in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene, I can celebrate life. Below my window, for example, the blossom is out in full. It’s a plum tree. It looks like apple blossom, but it’s white. And instead of saying, “Oh, that’s a nice blossom,” looking at it through the window when I’m writing, it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom that there ever could be. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter—but the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. And if people could see that—there’s no way of telling you, you have to experience it—the glory of it, if you like, the comfort of it, the reassurance. . . . Not that I’m interested in reassuring people, you know. The fact is that if you see the present tense, boy, do you see it, and boy, can you celebrate it!