If you have heard, over and over, how important it is to "Live in the Moment" and have employed various techniques and practices to bring you toward that goal, perhaps you've already discovered the basic flaw in that approach to life. I'm only discovering it now.
Living in the now moment can truly suck!
I know all the reasons I don't want to dwell on the past or worry about the future, and they all make sense. I've even embraced the quasi-religious notion that all of creation dwells in the present moment, there is nothing else. The trouble is, it just opens a whole new dimension of anxiety for me to try to Be Here Now.
Like this? Like this moment right now? Or how about this one? Did I miss it? It's gone and I didn't fully experience it. Oh damn. Now I'll never get it back. Ok this one. How's that?
For those of us brought up to look for the right answer, to try to perfect performance, living in the NOW is pretty intolerable. How will I know if I did it right? Can I open my eyes and peek?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining. My now moments are, by and large, pretty awesome these days. I wake up when I'm done sleeping. I'm in a great relationship with someone who doesn't want to change me, I'm surrounded by all the comforts of life --- heat, running water, electricity, internet ---- so there's nothing to whine or complain about. It's just this "living in the moment" thing that's got my panties in a wad. That, and the prospect that time is running out.
I get to worrying about whether I'm missing my moments, which pushes me out into the future, which takes me out of the moment, which means I miss some more --- you get the idea. It's HARD to just be. (Okay, that sounded like a whine.)
My mom, now, she's in the moment. All she's got left is the very right now. That's totally what I DO NOT want! I can't know what's going on in her Alzheimer Diseased mind, but it doesn't look like there are very many connections left. She perseverates on whatever is under her fingers, usually her pants leg, which she folds and rolls constantly. She smiles sometimes, and seems to recognize for a brief moment that somebody familiar is in front of her. But much of the time, her eyes are turned inward, as though the physical world around her doesn't exist. Is that "living in the moment?" Actually, I think it's dying in the moment, or at best, existing in the moment.
I overthink everything, because I can. I have always been afraid I would miss my life, and now that my memory sometimes frays around the edges, I'm even more afraid that I'll miss it. I think way too much about people who have gone before, what kinds of experiences they had, what it would have been like to be them. We have so many images available now, that it's easier than ever to recreate in imagination the world as it appeared in times past. Not so easy is replicating the sounds, smells, textures, voices that are gone.
It must be endemic in the brain of a novelist, or archivist, or historian, or depressive, to even want to bring to life that which is gone, in order to validate the present moment. Or maybe . . . maybe . . . it's past lives. Wooooooooooooo.
See what happens when I've got too much time on my hands and not enough motivation to clean house?
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