By the time your eyes react to these words bouncing off your screen, a housefly will have flapped its wings 20 times.
How’s that for giving the lie to living in the moment?
Moments are averse to inertia. You’d think their descent from the Latin momentum might have offered a clue.
Moments may be had, shared, captured, even ruined (including this one, perhaps, for many of you).
The reality is living in the moment is apocryphal sentimentality, a duplicitous artfully circulated occurrence that never actually occurs, and never has, not once, since the dawn of time.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about decelerating the pace of our lives, if for no other reason than to devote time to thinking and making sense of the world around us; to seize the little things seemingly prosaic on the surface and stitching them into a giant quilt of meaningful experiences.
We already have language for this that doesn’t brazenly fly in the teeth of physiology. It’s called “paying attention.” Not sexy, I know. It lacks that certain Madison Avenue je ne sais quoi, the declarative oomph that begs inscription on a coffee mug or pillow, the saccharine seal of a wellness industry that has built a $6.8 trillion economy around peddling mantric balms for whatever yesterdays or tomorrows warrant superficially rubbing out of existence.
It’s become coin of the realm in a world bent on influencing how you spend your time, but living in the moment is the analgesic existential slop we feed on when we’re starving for significance, the classic appetizer before the pièce de résistance: life is short. Really? Relative to what? Instagram Stories?…
There is nothing transformative about nowness. The Buddha himself knew not to be stuck in a moment and to instead onramp the experience toward enlightenment.
I’ll grudgingly concede the figurative appeal of living in the moment, succumbing to a bewitchingly viral self-care canon that calibrates for rampant uncertainty, that numbs the ugliness by freezing something beautiful. But that’s not living, is it? At least, not living consciously. It’s leveraging the lived experience into a form of denialism, a defence mechanism. It’s unhealthy, a cognitive cul-de-sac. How is this not what gives us pause instead?
We are never in sync with the real present. The human brain is the quintessential time traveller, awareness on the platinumest frequent flyer program. It’s what keeps us most in touch with feeling alive, how we shock our bodies awake.
Yes, moments matter; they are the stuff of occasion. Seize them. Make the most of them. But please do not contrive to live in them. That’s just selling life short.
