IX. The Present (time)

From my earliest memories of childhood I have been obsessed with time – both universal time and clock time. I recall driving along in the hoarfrost-covered hills of Eastern Tennessee with Jane, Christine, and Jane’s Grandma Perley when Grandma Perley turned her head toward me and calmly asked how old I was when I became fascinated with endlessness. Fascinated? Obsessed! By five!

I have a strongly “Type A” personality. I am sure that this is at the root of my successes. However, it is also at the root of what I see as my most serious flaws –related primarily to impatience. The dilemma for writing about both what has happened and what will happen is that it pulls me away from the point of thought, feeling, and action. The present, in a sense, vanishes into the past and is pulled into (or pushes us/me into) the future. So, there is no clean distinction between describing the past (and what I have done), and my plans for the future (where intention becomes action, or vanishes).

I think that it is a good idea to live in the present; to have a good time and to greet life’s challenges with enthusiasm and curiosity. I find that it is a bit easier when I am away from my home base. Here, I am constantly a little “off base” – struggling with the language, meeting new people at a rapid rate, and relying on simple routines that don’t require complicated upkeep and maintenance. That is what sabbaticals are for – to set aside time and space for reflection and to both see new things and experience old things in new ways. In this way, I then am “recreated” so that I will be more effective in my work.

As with many people whose intention is to be in the present, I often fail in my attempt to maintain a vibrant orientation to the here and now. The present is a vanishing point – something extraordinarily important to the life of the soul and the intellect, but which is very elusive. When I am not in the present, I am almost always in the future. I console myself in the belief that the ability to project ourselves into the future by more than a matter of few hours, days, weeks (or perhaps, for hibernating animals, for a full season of the year) is a uniquely human trait. My higher calling; to serve humanity and improve the public health (and I mean this in a very broad sense), requires anticipating problems and trends. So, I tend not to live in the past, even though I often actively remind myself that I must learn from the lessons that have been presented to me.

(All pictures were all shot in the past 24 hours)