Clock and Flat Iron Building, 24th St & Broadway NYC
There is a moment that you awaken in the morning. It is a moment of presence. You notice, that you are awake. My question is, after that, getting your feet on the floor and moving into the day, where are you in time? Are you in the past, are you in the future, or are you in the presence of the world?
When I awaken, I pass some threshold. If I remember the precise movement from sleeping to waking, it is on the timescale of a dream that I manage to hold onto. An imaginary timescale that can encompass years or seconds over the course of a night. But when I am awake, a new day begins. Whether heartbeats, breaths, or brain pulses, my waking hours are full of the cycles of life, periodic tasks that are done in regular intervals. These days of wakefulness punctuated by the imaginary timescapes of dreams measure my life.
To wonder about the quality of those moments is the crucial question of our life. If the phrases “Happy Life” and “Sad Life” are to have any meaning, then they describe a lifetime of the moments of mind. In this way, it is for your health and well being that we bring the consciousness of moments to the foreground, because time is all we have. What we are thinking about, and what we think about ourselves is the fabric of our life.
Are you thinking about the past? Are you thinking about choices that you made yesterday? Do the things you see remind you of events in the past week? Events in the past month? Are you reminded about events that happened years ago.
Are you thinking about meeting someone later today? Are you thinking about how you will pay the rent next month? Are you thinking about where you will be working in a year?
Do you see the ground under your feet? Do you see then many types of stones? Are you aware of all the people around you? Are you aware of any animals? What are the sounds that you can hear? Where are they coming from? Was there a sound you couldn’t hear before you were quiet enough, and started to pay attention? What are the scents in the air? Can you identify their sources?
How are you feeling? Literally, are you sitting in a chair? Where on your butt and back is the material of the chair touching you? How does your back feel? How does your stomach feel?
Senses evoke feelings, and feelings evoke memories. Memories are more than just memories of sensual moments, but also memory of previous times remembering. Here is where human languages have started to unbalance the equations. Common experiences can evoke memories of memories, and we are lead to use our conscious moments more and more to recall the same stories of the past, hopes or fears of the future.
Time sense like everything else requires a balance. To be a functioning human being in the modern civilization, we must maintain a sense of past, future, and the present moment. To be the best that we can be, to take the humanizer approach, it is the present moment that informs and orients our perspective on the past and the future.
The experience of the present moment is different from the others. It is not conceptual, it is visceral. Words to describe what is happening must always come later, reflecting on a moment which has passed and may now be commented on. The present moment has simply two halves, which are conjoined with each other. The sensual experience, and the emotional reaction.
The senses define the present moment. They are locked into it. Even if all we have is a sense of touch, there is input from a world of life, a world of bodies and beings. It is through the senses that we begin to make a model of the world. Then, when we see a car, when we hear an airplane, we “know” what it is. We no longer think “Oh, I am seeing light reflected off of something that looks rather like a car”, We just know, as we receive the light into our eye, “there’s a car, ” and even further, “I am a person who needs to be aware of the cars around them, and there’s one right now.”
In the same way, we recognize the people and objects which are important in our life. The sense and the recognition is one, as I see my mother, my wife, my son, my father. And in that recognition, the model of our world carries with it all of the shared experiences, good and bad, simple and complex. We are not even as conscious of the sense impression, as we are the meaning of that sense impression. We feel even as we recognize what we see.
When I was a child, I was deathly afraid of street cleaners. When I opened the car door on the street side once, a street cleaner was right there, just passing. After that for months I had nightmares, and would always run inside when I heard a street cleaner coming.
Today, I still think about it. But I got over my fear. I now know these big awkward machines are not there to attack me. They are part of the world. They are as dangerous as any other vehicle on the road, with the added adventure that the metal bristles that it uses to scrub the gutters do occasionally come flying off. I have a friend who had one such brush bristle go right through his ear. But the childish fear, the irrational fear, the fear without knowing what the consequences might be is gone.
I overcame that fear partially by starting to collect the bristles when I find them. Many people don’t know what they are, these thin metals strips which are occasionally shed. I’ve found a few, and it is my way of turning this habit of mind, being thrown into this past consciousness with special regard to street cleaners, and bring myself present, to search the ground for what is in front of me.
In our media rich environment, it is often not our own past and future which we are focused and thinking. We learn about, become interested in, and talk about celebrities, news, and many events which we become aware of second or third hand. Being immersed in the media playground is creating your niche as an observer, catching up on someone else’s past, and ever waiting for the fullfillment of endless previews.
This becomes compelling, because the media shows us many people who are interested in what they are showing. They show us images which confound and co opt our natural characteristics of recognition. They play on our natural concerns, and encourage behavior which supports attention on the past and future.
Being a humanizer is not about saying what is wrong. First we have to observe how things are. And it is this critical sense of time that is implicitly part of every moment’s awareness. It is at the key to self awareness, and therefore self identity.
To understand humanity in general, and ourselves in particular, we have to be willing to see the world in a fresh way. To do this, we need to explore the limits of our identity, and that is directly connected to our time orientation. Lessons from the past can be learned, and goals in the future reached only through the subtle balance of the actor in your present moment. To fulfill our potential, we can take back the power by first being aware of time.