One of my absolutely favorite movie scenes comes from “The Princess Bride.”
I can watch this on loop 24/7/365. Indeed, it should be required viewing by all first-year law students.
The mental agility of the arguments presented are fascinating.
If you can follow this, you can follow anything.
Which steers me towards the present moment of blogging.
There’s an interesting theory that time – past, present and future – is all occurring in the present moment.
The Philosophy of Time: Does the Past, Present, and Future Exist Simultaneously?
As I’ve gotten older, I tend to subscribe to this theory. This causes me to live each moment in that moment. Like this moment, and this one, etc. . . .
This has helped me immensely in dealing with my professionally retired but still lovely wife and her-self-generating Honey-Do lists. She literally walks into any space looking for the next thing she wants to change about it.
I used to get upset whenever she would begin providing future directives on something new that just happens to pass into her present moment view. This is especially true when I happen to be – in the present moment – working on something else on her list.
For example, yesterday, as Lisa and I are driving out of the driveway, she glances across the front property and declares, “We need to put away the lawn furniture.” The use of “we,” in and of itself, is a misuse of the plural pronoun, because as long as we have lived at Casa Claire, Lisa has never put away lawn furniture. What she really means is “Tommy, you must put away the lawn furniture.”
Me, living only in the moment where we are driving to get Lisa fish and chips for lunch, now says to myself, “That is never going to happen because it’s in the future and the future doesn’t exist separate and apart from my presently driving out of my driveway. Tommy boy, stay on your plane of existence.”
That and a long, quiet, deep breath keeps me from driving the car in the moment into the nearest tree, otherwise ensuring that the future of me putting away lawn furniture, never comes into existence.
I get a lot of “we need to” instructions in the present moment when it appears I may be doing nothing and have learned to stand up and do whatever follows those words immediately, which always brings the follow up, “You don’t need to do it right now.” BTW, that singular objective subject that begins that follow-up line always proves the “we” fallacy.
One of the reasons I immediately do what is asked in those moments is that it gets me away from the source of the self-generating Honey Do list before it expands any further.
If I am out-of-sight, I am out-of-mind. If there is no Jesus sitting at the wedding table in Cana, he can produce no more wine. He cannot even be asked to do so.
And when I am off in my moment doing my “we” task, “I” can just focus on that task. I don’t worry about anything else, just what is right in front of me. Could be doing laundry. It could be herding my recyclables from within the three levels of Casa Claire and out to the street. It could be repairing a wind chime. It could be shoveling shit.
Now I blame this time-is-not-linear perception on my inability to get my tenses straight when I’m writing anything. Every one of my precious inner-circle, and my cold beta readers who get to read the finished article when I have completed a draft, will tell you that I love to play fast and loose with my tenses. I can mix present, past and future participles in one sentence with the agility of a three-card Monty pro on the streets of New York. And that is because my present, past and future are occurring in the “now.” I am watching something occur in my real time, even if it’s in the past of a character that may be sharing it in a novel that has not yet found its future.
I know that if I try to stop and fix this as it occurs during the writing process, I will be forever stuck in a present moment mental loop that never proceeds beyond one sentence.
So, I just live in the now and let the Elves type the dictation coming through in the moment from the Field, without worrying what others may think about my grammar, or spelling, or punctuation sometime in the future that may be happening on a different plane in that same moment.
As far as I am concerned, that is lawn furniture we may never have to put away.
And yet, as I replay life’s memories, which I assume – without proof – are real, I seem to remember a past where a lot of other lawn furniture has been repeatedly put away. Thank God, that is not part of my present moment, where I am typing this blog thinking about nothing but silly things.
Well, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I plan to focus on the here and now of outdoor chores which I will not articulate because it is a future that is happening on another plane that may never cross over into this one.
However, you fine, five readers remain free to live linearly, and so I hope that whatever errands may (or may not) appear on your respective Honey-Do lists today, Saturday, do not interfere with your enjoying every second of your weekend life, in each moment, however it presents itself.
And no matter what else we get up to in an always fluctuating future, let’s make today a great one.
