Presentosis

It’s the beginning of a sweater which brings us to the raw guts of the problem:  this “sweater” is not a sweater.  At all.  It’s a bunch of loose threads hanging from a neckline, otherwise known as a chaotic mess.  It’s not a sweater at all, people!  It’s just a bunch of loose threads and nobody is sure how they’ll get connected.

That’s the present.  You can’t wear it, it looks crazy, it is crazy, and you can’t make judgments about it until later, when the loose ends connect into something whole-ish.

Huh?  You can’t make accurate judgments about the present until it’s passed into the past?  What about this “live in the moment” ethos?

Good question.  Glad you asked.  Let’s jump right in—right into the maelstrom of time and consciousness, which is the only known cure for Presentosis.

It might sound a little tricky or bogus but if you’re out of patience with Presentosis, you’ll probably be open to trying this hoary, venerable medicine man recipe:  first, mix up equal parts New Age froth with Old Age gravity, then add more equal parts of past, present and future, and shake until stirred.  Set aside until your mind undoes itself, about seven minutes in most cases (depending on altitude).  Conserve one-fifth for delving into the eternal now later.  Pour the remaining four-fifths of the froth, wisdom, past, present, and future mixture into four empty one fifth bottles, and drink three of them or be willing to consider another analogy, whichever comes first.

If you’re still good with all this, then consider the following analogy.  And if you’re not, well, consider it anyway.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re a football fan or not.  What have you got to protect?  Just pretend for a minute.  It won’t kill you.  (And if it does, well, you were going to die of Presentosis anyway.)

Everyone in football knows the coaches’ maxim is true:  you can’t tell what happened in the game until you see the film.  What?  This from the guy on the sidelines, in real time, watching the game as it happens, plus he knows every player’s name and proclivities, and he doesn’t know what happened in real time until he sees it replayed in slow motion later?

Think about this for seven minutes, or seven seconds at least, and you see twenty-two guys racing around a flat field with well-marked boundaries for about three to five seconds and they all fall down, and they get up and do it again, and nobody knows what happened until later?  No, they don’t know, because it’s too complicated and you can’t figure out the flow and the errors and the magical athleticism until it’s all in slow motion and viewed from another point in time.

So if twenty-two guys racing around a very well-defined acre of flat ground is too complicated to understand until later, then how in the hell can anyone pretend to understand—in present time—the flow and interactions of around two hundred nations with around 6.5 billion human beings and more other species than we can even count, on a planet rotating in multiple directions around a star, a galaxy, and bunches of other supra-galactic conflagrations?

So if you can’t understand now until later, where does this leave us with our live-in-the-moment ethos?

Not to worry, folks!  You can eat and have your cake, too!  You can be both player and coach.  Which is to say—you can have your indelible moments of pure immersion on the gridiron of life when bodies are flying and everything is happening at once yet you see it all and find the guy sprinting down the sideline as if on slow motion film and you heave the pass that floats into his palms in eternal present time that lasts forever.  And you can also nurture comprehension of it all from the ever-gathering perspective of time, thanks to the fifth of the concoction conserved in the recipe.  How so?  The retained fifth is the part of attention that rolls across the years, so that the player-in-the-moment intelligence and the slow motion review intelligence enrich each other.

But don’t screw it up with shallow Presentosis.  Don’t go around saying,  “In these uncertain times . . .”  because all times are uncertain.  All times are trying and fraught; some more so than others, certainly.  But the present is always a mess and a tangle and perpetually unwearable, at least to the office or jobsite.

But maybe that’s why it’s called “the present.”  It’s also a gift dripping with gobs of opportunity interwoven with tons of proto-undone bristling-with-life fuckedupedness.

But we digress.  Or at least you have.  So back to the hard-boiled point.  Actually, several emerge:

•  The eternal now exists forever, but not always.

•  If you’re being a human being, you have to spend a good portion of your present time removed—away in the past and in the future.  It’s part of your job, and it goes on your permanent record.

•  Don’t ever go around bloviating about “these fraught times.”

•  The present is not a sweater.

•  The incomprehensibility of present time is enhanced by comprehending the incomprehensibility of football, but it would better if it were two-hand touch.

•  Don’t ever write any of us here in the room about “in these uncertain times.”