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It is by no means as easy as it may look to live in the immediate present. It requires a high degree of awareness of one's self. The less I am conscious of myself as the 'one who's in charge' - the more unfree and automatic I am - the less I am aware of the immediate present.
I remember when I worked in a telecommunications factory labouring on an extremely boring repetitive task. I was so alienated, it was as if I were someone else. I felt as if I was a million miles away from what I was doing. I was in a daze, or as though in a dream. The job was so simple that a monkey could have done it - it required no amount of concentration at all. It was as if there was a wall between the present and me. It is often useful I find, to ask myself, "What am I experiencing at this very moment?" or "Where am I - what is most significant to me at this present moment?" I'll tell you what has sparked off this musing about that slippery, eel-like state of the present. I've just been re-reading my favourite poem of all time - 'Burnt Norton' from 'The Four Quartets' by T.S. Eliot. For me, the poem evokes my youth, when I was stumbling towards some kind of spiritual awareness of what it is like to be a thinking human being. Although written by an American - a very cultured, anglicised, American, from that most English of American States – Massachusetts - it is quintessentially an English poem. The poem deals with the problem of time - trying to pin down the UN-pin-downable (a neologism newly coined at this precise moment in the present!) |
