Living in the present - making a start on the road to success

Living in the present

by

Robert L. Fielding

This is a short conversation I had with my mother, Beryl Fielding, some time before she passed away.
RLF: What we call the present is the here and now, isn’t it?

BF: Yes, but when we speak in what we call the present tense, we speak of a present that includes the recent past, depending on how recently we are speaking of; the actual present, and some short, foreseeable way into the future.

RLF: So, when I say, I live in England, I mean that I live in England at this precise moment, and that I have lived here for some time and intend living here for some time to come.

BF: The present continuous tense is little better. I ask you what you are doing now, and you reply that you are working at a university in the Middle East, and I am meant to realize that you have been working there for some time, and will go on working there in the future.

RLF: Yes, the present in language covers a much wider vision than how I want to use the word.

BF: What do you mean by the present?

RLF: Only what you are experiencing now, this very moment, even though the moment quickly evaporates into the past. Really, I call the present that which can be sensed. If you can think about it, or better, recall it through thinking, then it already belongs to the past – the immediate past.

BF: So, what I can see with my eyes, touch with my hands, taste with my mouth, hear with my ears, and smell through my nostrils is the present.

RLF: That is it, yes. If you close your eyes and breathe in through your nose, you will smell the present. If you are standing in a field of newly mown grass, you will smell the earth giving up its own. If you take a bite of an apple, you will taste the sweetness of the Earth. Drink water, which we say, has no taste, and you will taste purity of the Earth.

Look up at the sky, at the clouds or the clear blue sky with the sun blazing at everything, you will see the environment of God's Creation.

Touch the ground barefoot, and you will be touching the beginnings of life in all its forms. Listen to absolute silence and you will be hearing the Earth before man trod across it. This is the present, and it is this that should be lived, given thanks for, enjoyed, glorified in and sensed through the eyes, nose, mouth, ears and through the skin. Let thoughts intrude, as they will, and you immediately move, or try to move away from the present.

You think of something that has happened, or you plan what you would like to happen, or worry about what may happen, whereas if you stay in the present, your thoughts will attune with who you are and the world in which you live and you will be happy. Too much of what troubles is stems from too much wandering in the past or the future.

BF: But we need to think about what we are going to be doing ahead of doing it, surely, and in learning how to do it properly, we recall what we did in the past and how we did it. How can we go about our everyday business without doing that?

RLF: Of course, you are right, we could not survive in life if we did not continually refer back to past, learned experiences, even mistakes. It is in how we refer to the past that affects our life in the present. Thinking rationally about how to bake a cake while we are in the process of baking it is not going to give us grief, unless we include in those thoughts what someone said to us to upset us whilst we were in the kitchen – and in that case, we have left the rational, ‘cake-baking’ of our thoughts and allowed our minds to wander to what needn’t concern us.

Scientifically, physically, if we recall the ingredients of the cake, and measure them out, mix them and then place the mixture in a baking tin and place it in an oven that has been pre-heated at a specific gas mark for a precise amount of time, then we will have baked ourselves a cake every bit as delicious as the last one we baked, and to which we referred to in our mind when baking this one.

However, the same is most definitely not true of the incident we recall from the kitchen on that occasion – when our friend said something nasty to us, perhaps in retaliation for something we had said. It is difficult to remember - more difficult than remembering how to bake a cake.

This is my point. The conditions in which we bake a cake can be recreated practically exactly and therefore inform us how to bake this cake now. The conditions which preceded an argument between you and your friend in the kitchen cannot, and therefore it is wholly pointless and futile to dwell on them.

Only refer to the past when it is helpful to do so for present purposes. If we only did just that, we would find little to complain about in this life. Good luck with the cake. Good luck with your life!
Robert L. Fielding