thinking about Now
Now is the time to write of Now, this moment I can’t catch any more than I can see the edge of darkness chased down by the glare when I flip on a light switch at night. The light is on or it’s off, it is light or it’s dark. The moment is Now or it’s not, and no fleeting hand scrawling madly, no profligate tongue could beg to keep up. It is all my thought can do to entertain the notion, and if I make the actual leap to begin to consider all the components that make up Now – why, I’m unceremoniously dumped in the drink, watching the backside of the moment Now I had just been a part of making a beeline for the horizon.
That’s the beauty of Now, we’re too slatternly slow to even think about it in real time. Probably hummingbirds feel like they have oodles of time to consider Now – they begin to have the speed to comprehend it, while we’re almost doomed to live in the past or the future.
Most likely I’ve got it all wrong and hummingbirds probably find it just as devilishly difficult to ponder Now. It’s just that their sense of it is infinitely quicker and finer than ours. Life seems to be like that: bring more tools and strengths to the table, find just as many challenges that are a match for your resources. We walk about in blinders, suddenly turning to discover a magnolia in full bloom: oh my! Of course, it’s been blooming its head off for days - it just took you till now to notice - and our physiology noodges us to believe that means it just happened. Oh yes, and we are each of us the center of the universe.
What all I will never see could almost lead my heart to the breaking point if it weren’t that I’m already completely overwhelmed, bushwhacked, undone by the great gobs of life I can see. Too much. Too much for one soul peering out of one pair of mortal eyes. We never get the hang of it, our grey matter hammering away like enzymes on all we take in, even in our sleep, in a vain attempt to break it all down into something sensible, keeping abreast of developments, beginning to see all the fine meshes of networks like dendrites connecting this to that and that to these many other things.
I love us for this. Thank god that, if the brain makes noises processing this vast unwieldy input, we can’t hear it or we’d never get item #1 done. What a clatter it must make somewhere, however microscopically. Kaffir lime leaves, Hamas, suds in a bucket, the new black, Richard the Lionhearted, Mothers Day, 2-5-1, don’t forget fabric softener, tweak in the left knee, co-sines, 9600 bps modem, Sam Mocksby, white breasted nuthatch, pentatonic scale of the wind chime, interest rate up .25%, prime’s at 8 now, Grandma had four sisters and their names all start with F, Tenbrooks was a big fine horse…Just a fraction of inventory of what’s current in my brain. Where do we conjure up the illusion of consistency, of interconnectedness that stitches this hornet’s nest together and lets us walk through the world confident in our individual-as-a-snowflake identities?
That’s the beauty of Now, we’re too slatternly slow to even think about it in real time. Probably hummingbirds feel like they have oodles of time to consider Now – they begin to have the speed to comprehend it, while we’re almost doomed to live in the past or the future.
Most likely I’ve got it all wrong and hummingbirds probably find it just as devilishly difficult to ponder Now. It’s just that their sense of it is infinitely quicker and finer than ours. Life seems to be like that: bring more tools and strengths to the table, find just as many challenges that are a match for your resources. We walk about in blinders, suddenly turning to discover a magnolia in full bloom: oh my! Of course, it’s been blooming its head off for days - it just took you till now to notice - and our physiology noodges us to believe that means it just happened. Oh yes, and we are each of us the center of the universe.
What all I will never see could almost lead my heart to the breaking point if it weren’t that I’m already completely overwhelmed, bushwhacked, undone by the great gobs of life I can see. Too much. Too much for one soul peering out of one pair of mortal eyes. We never get the hang of it, our grey matter hammering away like enzymes on all we take in, even in our sleep, in a vain attempt to break it all down into something sensible, keeping abreast of developments, beginning to see all the fine meshes of networks like dendrites connecting this to that and that to these many other things.
I love us for this. Thank god that, if the brain makes noises processing this vast unwieldy input, we can’t hear it or we’d never get item #1 done. What a clatter it must make somewhere, however microscopically. Kaffir lime leaves, Hamas, suds in a bucket, the new black, Richard the Lionhearted, Mothers Day, 2-5-1, don’t forget fabric softener, tweak in the left knee, co-sines, 9600 bps modem, Sam Mocksby, white breasted nuthatch, pentatonic scale of the wind chime, interest rate up .25%, prime’s at 8 now, Grandma had four sisters and their names all start with F, Tenbrooks was a big fine horse…Just a fraction of inventory of what’s current in my brain. Where do we conjure up the illusion of consistency, of interconnectedness that stitches this hornet’s nest together and lets us walk through the world confident in our individual-as-a-snowflake identities?
posted by Kelly Kessler at 3:30 PM
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