Simple things continually peck and gnaw at my attention, the trivial, the everyday, those things that appear in their fullness only in the present tense.
But I fight against their intrusion and seek a vantage over them that lies outside of time: I sketch breathtaking prophesies of the future and paint thrilling mythologies of the past—only to watch helplessly as familiar demons repaint my mental canvas, shading tomorrow and yesterday with hues of fear and regret, respectively.
But in this moment, occupied with this routine task and the one that follows and the one that follows that, here, surrounded by all of these regular things, here and now is where I spend my time; even as my mind slides away into yesterday’s clumsy conversation or tomorrow’s stalking treachery, I am at all moments standing inside the humdrum context of right now. Always right now.
In the end, it may be a simple failure to acknowledge proportion, a proportional blindness: a malignant form of base-rate neglect. Moments that earn the title of event are exceedingly rare, and yet these are what my memory is stocked with: things that scarcely ever happen—and never happen in the ways they are remembered.
Life is not in these things. Life is in the ordinary, the commonplace, the unexciting, the all-day-long now. But it is precisely this that I dismiss as nothing of importance. I am living life upside down. My reckoning of experience is inverted; I grant meaning to the ultimately unmeaningful and look right through that which is of greatest consequence: the sheer impertinence of biological necessity, the perpetual imposition of a world that moves through time and drags me along with it.
There is a Pawnee prayer that ends with “Remember the sacredness of things.” I want to add: “Also remember that all things appear in their fullness only within the present tense.”
