The present moment becomes past as soon as I step into it. The best I can do is breathe my way through it, experience it as it occurs in fleeting points of lucidity that fragment and dissipate almost instantly, blown aside by loud, vaporous exhalations of the restless rutting beasts that inhabit my mental menagerie: associative half-recollections and tacit anticipation, fairytales of the past and mythical prophesies of the future.
Each instant is a non sequitur, an entirely novel emergence, and yet each is irredeemably saturated with the past. Heraclitus tells me I cannot step into the same river twice; the water of my first step has long since flowed downstream by the time I take a second. And, by extension, the me that steps into the water is not the same me that stepped before, only a moment ago. The river at my feet carries with it its entire prior course, sediment and debris from upstream, water that has passed all points along its path. In this way too, when I step into the present moment, I carry with me not merely my entire life’s experience up to that point, but the entire history of the universe.
And there is something else. Something impossible. This moment right now, as it opens itself up to me, here, as my fingers slap against the keyboard in front of me, is not the same moment that is opening itself to the dog curled up on the floor beside me, or the tree outside my window. These are not just different observational perspectives, different facets of the same temporal movement, different features of the same perpetual incipience; they are entirely incommensurate, each belonging to entirely unique experiential epochs.
And yet they coexist, cohabitate—miraculously interdigitate.
