The Leading Edge Of Time

THE LEADING EDGE OF TIME

Christopher Nyerges

[Nyerges is an educator and the author of many books, including  “Extreme Simplicity,” “How to Survive Anywhere,” and many others.  More information is available at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com].

I have nearly always thought deeply about time, even as a young child.  When I was 10 or so and enrolled in Catholic school, the nuns and priests schooled us in the dogmas of the Church, such as “God has always existed,” and “God has no beginning and no end.” I don’t recall if my classmates ever exerted much mental effort to consider the application of the dogma that we routinely recited.  I know that I spent considerable time wracking the nerve endings of my still-developing brain trying to see how something – anything – could have no beginning and no end.

I had less trouble with the idea that something could have no end, since to have no end, a thing would simply need to continue to exist, endlessly, forever, continually.  But to have no beginning?  How does one reckon backwards? How far back is too far?  A span of time called infinity, going backwards in time, seemed impossibly difficult to grasp.  Regardless how far back in time one could go, that’s still not infinity, still not back to the “no beginning.” 

Doesn’t everything require a beginning?  Even God? There never seemed to be a rational way to extend backward into infinity. Something that never ends, of course, is equally without ration, but it’s slightly easier to grasp.  The thing continues to continue. OK.

In time, I had neither the luxury or desire to solve Catholicism’s most fundamental dogmas, and mysteries, as many more pressing and practical matters pressed upon my mind.

As a teen and growing older, I often obsessed about my future.  Not “the future,” but “my” future.  Where will I be in 5 years?  What will I be doing? Where will I be living?  In time, this expanded into “the” future.  What will the world be like in 10 years?  Will we all be using flying vehicles like in the Jetsons?  Will our food become nothing but pills?  Will world civilization evolve and flourish, or will it devolve into a Dark Age?

But a more fundamental question was: How will I know that I have arrived at the future? Thus began a lifelong consideration of the nature of time, past, present, and future.

I remember some of the catch phrases from the 70s, like “Be Here Now.”  I remember a guru who would say “Now is the only reality.”  Of course, I expected gurus and their types to expound with abstract phrases, and even nonsensical statements that have no basis in the real world.  And yet, as I passed through the hours of each day, finding myself back in school another day, finding myself getting ready for bed again, and observing the current experience, a very simple realization began to hit home as a fundamental reality.  I realized that I never experienced the future.  Never.  Now, I don’t mean that on Monday when I think about what I might do on Thursday, and then Thursday comes and I do what I do.  Thursday is the future from the Monday perspective, but when I experienced Thursday, it was in this moment.  The moment of Now, the now that is the only reality. 

As I move from Monday to Thursday, and from Saturday to Tuesday, and from March to June, I never experience the “future.”  I only live and can only live in the leading edge of time, the now.  It sounds abstract but every one must know that this is so.  The sun rises, goes across the sky, sets below the horizon and thus measures our sense of time.  Things change, things are born and they die, and yet, we never, ever experience this thing we call “the past.”  We can recall it, and hopefully learn from, but we only experienced it as “the now.” And the flow of time and the changing of scenery continued, all in the Now.  And we never, ever experience the future, because “the future” is simply an abstraction.  When the supposed future arrives, we only experience it as a flowing moment of time in the Now.

All this is not the mathematics of calculus, necessarily, but is the reality of our subjective experience of life.

This knowledge of The Now informs me about so many things. For example, how dwelling on the past and all your mistakes can sap your energy and provide nothing useful.  Or, dwelling on the future to the extent that you are not living fully in the moment, since your mind is elsewhere. We generally, collectively, do not fully live in the Now. 

Multi-tasking is a bogus concept where we kid ourselves into thinking we can do many projects at once, as if we were running out of time!  In fact, multi-tasking is nearly always doing more things poorly.  It is a form of trying to be fully into the Now, but because we are not mentally focusing our attention like a laser beam, multi-tasking is not living the Now.

Time is like a train that is constantly moving.  It cannot be stopped, but just goes on. 

What is the practicality of all the foregoing?  I didn’t say to forget the past.  Learn lessons from it.  Identify what you did wrong, and what you did right, so you can always improve your actions.  And I didn’t say that you should not plan ahead. You should and you must plan ahead so that you don’t just wander through life bouncing from thing to thing that “comes along.”  Procrastinators live in an imaginary future that never seems to come, though they often say “I will get to it later.”

Living in the moment and understanding that the Now is all we have for improving our lives is a step in the right direction on the path of our human evolution.