The Present is the Future Past

The elusive now, always is, yet never was. It's not now if it was. If now was, it would be then. So, now never was, and it never would be. Now is. (...and always will be???) No. Now will not always be, because then it would be.

When my brain is on overdrive trying to comprehend something like this, I like to look to Spaceballs for Mel Brooks' near-infinite wisdom: When will then be now? Soon...

The harder I try to freeze my experience, to grasp my thought, to stick a pin through it and put it in a display case, the quicker it seems to evaporate into a hollow corpse. As I peruse my collection of brittle exoskeletons of past perceptions, I can only fumble clumsily with the distinct and defunct parts, purposes, circumstances, and emotional consequences in a rather objective attempt to recreate the actual experience. But all that does is cast a shadow on the moment I think of it; a sprinkle of another ingredient into the stew of who I am immediately: an ever-thickening and ripening soup sloshing and sliding in a stretching and morphing elastic bag precariously balancing on top of my head, constantly, fluidly persuading the direction I look and swim through material existence.

This baggage, this weight, this momentum, this compulsion into the direction of the future that becomes the present, constantly assimilates each new perception, experience, and thought into what I think, who I think I am. Structure, routine, and dogged habits are the accouterments I subconsciously use to sever my seemingly fruitless effort of perpetual self-perception. Even trying to put this pursuit of embracing the infinitely slippery now into words is in itself a distraction. I feel I can't stop thinking about it...so I think that if I try to break it down, rationalize it, chunk it up into metaphors, visually and kinetically drill it into the part of me that answers questions and solves problems...I think that will explain it. That will make it make sense. But as soon as I start doing that, I start letting the machine of me assign a rigid function to each aspect of my analysis...and here I am, left looking at an empty shell. An inadequately designed, powerless, hollow robot: with each part hastily hung from a flimsy hook to merely physically resemble one word of the guttural expulsion I hoped could help me understand what it is I thought I found.

And just like that, it's over. It's time to go back to the daily grind. But I'll be here again, soon enough, via a different set of circumstances, with more in my arsenal of analysis to try to pin it down again. Which is obviously the wrong way of going about comprehending existence....

I'd like to do a little research into Zen practices. I'm not going to become Buddhist, but I would like to see how some obviously well-employed practices of attempting to comprehend existence can coincide with Christian doctrines that I've more than likely repeatedly overlooked. It could be something as simply as actually pondering the scriptures, rather than just me saying I'm pondering the scriptures, when really I'm just wondering if the Cardinals' offense has enough firepower to overcome the Steelers' stingy defense.

Learning about belief is good.