Saturday, September 07, 2013

Carpe Diem

Life for this moment – this moment is your life. [1]


If the momentum in life is in anticipation, then what about now? Are we really all het up about what’s next to come, are we truly living?

To put a meter on life itself and try to measure out how much of each moment is about the next one or how much we’re actually living today isn’t what we’re meant to be capable of. If all we’re constantly thinking about the next moment how can we say this moment right now is being lived.

Life’s just this huge turmoil – not only to be taken with a negative connotation – it’s this big deluge that’s constantly churning, at any given moment we can be as much in yesterday as we would be in tomorrow. The sheer levels of parallelism upon which we as human entities rest are profound. While physically in the now, we could also be emotionally in the past, and cognitively already in the future.

I sometimes get irritated with people who cannot stop to smell the roses [2]. Those who are always constantly anxious about the upcoming events yet to happen, simply because they aren’t sure how those events will turn out. If you can’t control it, then let go.

And then you’ve got those who don’t prepare for the future. Because there again is that transitory phenomenon wherein anticipation and expectation reside – the people who don’t take today to do what they can control and then fritter away the time in anxiety consequential.

Then when you truly think about it, what really is the ‘now’? I mean, by the time you think of this now, it’s already passed. And so has the one that came after it, and then this one….yup, that’s also gone.

Every moment sliding out of our hands like sand, it’s almost no wonder that our society is so obsessed with the future. Since time immemorial, there have been so many methods for foretelling, predicting, or reading our ‘futures’. That’s to assume somehow that it’s already programmed. (Who is to tell whether that’s the case or not.)

But when we’re always looking ahead what about all this time that’s been passing under our noses? Stop.

If we’re not up to our gills with preparing for something or the other, we’re filling in the rest of the time with a storm of emotions, clouding up our mental space, our emotional well-being. And that can be a serious block.

Take me, for example. For whatever reasons, I’ve found I couldn’t just sit still and write. For some time now, if you hadn’t noticed. If it’s not just already being so darned busy doing other things, then it’s time squandered by that heavy emotional storm – although intangible and invisible, it’s still got a huge powerful effect on me. It is afterall, my mental ability that is being subverted.

But why? Why, I ask myself, must I be subverted? Why have I stopped being able to sit down peacefully and take time for myself and write?

It’s kind of odd, if I had to explain this, because in one instance, I sort of felt I had nothing to write about. That with everything happening routinely, and being emotionally exhausted by other things, there was so temporal space for me to fit in this menial task of putting thoughts to paper.

Like I said, it’s odd. Because often I’ve felt I needed some sort of angst, or some sort of extra joyousness to write something, anything. And yet, if something did happen, it more often than not felt extremely personal and I couldn’t write and therefore share with others.

So how come I have been writing these days? You know what? I don’t have a clue, myself. But the point is, does it matter? Why must I ferret away or chisel everything down to an explanation – it’s the moment that is now that is important, no?

Sometimes I don’t need to think about what’s going to happen when I wake up. Because, regardless, whatever will happen will happen.


[1]Found in IQ's List of Favourite Quotes
[2] I know I KNOW I'm being repetitive; I know I've often written about this - I apologize.