Living for everything

Stephanie and I were talking briefly at lunch about living in the moment, as it relates to those times where your mind races constantly and you just can't stop thinking. Indeed, if you're always thinking about what's next, you'll likely miss what's happening now. The days will just fly by and become months, then years, then decades, and you may not realize you missed it all.

But living in the moment is a lot more complicated than it sounds. With every passing day, your life becomes a little more full, and those experiences, for better or worse, define you. Some of those experiences really fuck you up, others make you better. Hopefully you get some good memories out of them. The biggest challenge I suppose is processing your past in a way that allows you to be at peace with it. That leads to more thinking of course, but letting go, accepting or processing your past isn't any easier than living in the moment.

The opposite direction in time is probably the one that makes you most crazy. Imagine a giant piece of graph paper that fills a wall, and each little square is a moment of your life. Some portion of that giant graph is filled with little images of events in your life, and the rest is this giant, white, unfilled space. It could be filled with virtually anything until there's no more room, at which point you die.

What do you do to fill that space? The possibilities can make you comatose. Just in the near future you have career considerations, family, money to make, bills to pay, tasks to complete. The possibilities can block all of the things that are in front of you, from simple things like condensation on a glass of water, to the brief touch of another human being.

How do you reconcile all of this? The best I can do is to see that prior to any particular day of my life, uncertainty was there, the moment came, and I lived through it. The next moment is going to happen too, whether I like it or not.

That comes full circle to the idea that you have to do something in the moment to make it worthwhile. What constitutes an extraordinary moment? It's not every day that you get your first pay check, have a first kiss, start college, buy a car, take an exotic vacation, get married, etc. If living life in the moment is held to those extraordinary standards, most days will be a disappointment.

So the best conclusion I can reach is that you have to live for everything, including your past, the moment and the future. They're all so connected in a way that defines who you are and will be. Bad stuff happens, good stuff happens, and a lot of the time, seemingly mundane things happen. It's OK to think about and try to reach a particular goal in the future, so long as you don't forget where you've been or that things are happening around you right this moment.

As with most things in life, there are few absolutes. The conventional wisdom is carpe diem, and in the larger sense, I agree with that advice. However, it's insane to think you can live a normal life by ignoring the past and the possibilities of the future. That, to me means living for everything. It can certainly be done, just don't let the past and future completely overshadow the present.