Finding Freedom in the Present

In light of a recent work-related achievement, I was asked, at a public forum, to share how my professional life decisions had contributed to this specific accomplishment. The question was well-intentioned but it reinforced, for me, how the present is often, albeit unwittingly, ambushed and held hostage by reverberations from the past - the steps we took or didn’t take to ‘realise’ a specific reality. History seems to, for many, posit how we should thrive in the present. The reverse is also true. We scrutinise lost opportunities and unfulfilled dreams that have escaped us, and lament about how our life has taken the form it has partly due to destiny and partly, due to our own doing. Most of our lived experience (as much as we deny it) consists of a hypnotising exchange between continuity and termination, what is, what should have been and what is no longer. For some, life is a period of perennial mourning for lives unlived and for others, a nostalgic reverie of past successes.

While these internal narratives feed on past events and circumstances with unrestrained velocity, the energising quality of life and living is only found in the present. But instead of fully inhabiting our present, we are often overcome with temptation to regard it as posterity’s past. We view the present as a by-product of yesteryear’s triumphs and torments, a phenomenon French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir referred to as the human temporal bias. In other words, the present is instinctually prefaced, contextualised and furnished with narratives of the past - it is manacled to history and stripped of independent autonomy. There is a price to pay for adopting a blinkered view of the present - we’re wholly dependent on reference points in history, no matter how tenuously linked, to make sense of reality.

Whilst we’re frantically sieving through the past - the dusty archives of lived experiences and the tattered pages of missed chances and regrets, we’re also unintentionally anaesthetising ourselves to relishing the fruits of the immediate present. Retrospection often reveals both pain and glory but it is the former that remains etched in our minds because of its anticipated implications for the present and future.

Any historian will tell you that human affairs have been bedevilled by chaos, pain and turbulence since time immemorial. The world is bruised and bleeding. However, it is important not to succumb to its malevolence at the expense of the understated but unique wonderment that exists in each present moment. The following passage from Beauvoir masterfully captures the human realisation that the very existence of the present self - the notion of being - is incredulously mesmerising and reason enough for us to be more appreciative our own elementally curious nature.

Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?

The present forces us to confront the perplexity of personal identity - who we are in each waking moment. As Beauvoir’s excerpt above alludes to, our present selves are unrecognisably different from our past selves, but different nonetheless, and woefully flawed at making our future selves happy. The significance of the present is premised on simply existing - it is not married to any causal chain of events or a prescribed timeline. But the human mind has a penchant for arranging arbitrary moments and the infinitely messy mysteries of life into mosaics of meaning as way of seeking perceived closure.

It is a barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived and made through the present moment; this small, moving window. Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. Until we as a collective human race discover steps towards valuing the past, present and future with equal attention to achieve some sort of temporal neutrality, all we have as accessible refuge is the present moment.