By the time tomorrow arrives it is today, so, there is no future only the present, but our brains create a future and we worry that the future may not be what we want, need or deserve. It is amazing how our brains can craft a time that will never exist except for? Correct, in our brains.
In my experience the anticipation of something has always been more amplified that the actual event. We are often disappointed when the event arrives because it does not live up to the images our minds have created of how things are going to be. We imagine happiness as a state of being but, in fact, it is minute moments in time that our brains expand in memory. For some we want what is past to be the future, but it can’t be for we have become a different person as have the people and things around us. We long for simpler, more peaceful times but when were those times. The forties, no the world was locked in mortal combat in the first half of the decades and in the latter half it was rebuilding itself while Eastern Europe fell under the spell of the Soviets. The fifties, no we were engaged in another war, this time against Communism. We were taught to duck and cover and everyone lived in fear of the bomb. Fall out shelters were being installed in the back yards of the upper middle class and even though they knew it would do no good, we were taught to get under our desks in school. Did anyone ever notice that the drills ended while we were under our desks? No how to exit the school or where to go or, well, anything. Just get under your desk.
Were the sixties better? No, there was still the nuclear threat and then there was Vietnam and the riving of society. Assassinations and race riots. Washington, D.C. was burning and women were burning their bras. Young men were burning their draft cards and other young men were dying in a foreign country on behalf of a people who had no concept of representational government and would just as soon have been left alone.
The seventies, eighties, nineties… No, for each had its prevailing threats and problems economic and political. Since the past is over and the future can never be, should we not concern ourselves with the present? There’s an old Stoicism saw that says, “Consider yourself dead. Now live the new life as it should be lived.” And, of course, there is always the advice to live in the moment. I’ve always wondered why there are some many religious tenets and so much dogma about this and that. It should be pretty simple, love God and treat others as you would be treated. Don’t need all that other stuff, it just gets in the way. In fact if you just follow the second you’re pretty much taking care of the first as well. Try it and you’ll see that in the end when your life is weighed on the scales of providence you’ll come out to the good.
Happy Holy Days
well said!