Future of Presents Past

 “Past, Present, and Future, walked into a bar … it was tense”. (Read it from somewhere)

Regardless of social status, wealth and positions of authority, there seems to be only one universal equalizer – Time.  No one escapes it. Whoever said, “time is money” may have been on to something but no one yet has ever saved it, bank it, lend it or even gather any interest on it.  Yes, we get something in return for our time; we get paid and remembered for it but each and every one gets the same amount, yet somehow we all get different results from it.

I say though, that it is not that one has more time but it is whether one chooses to do more with what quantity of time one has.

 “The past is behind, learn from it.  The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.” – Thomas S. Monson

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu

If that is the case then we cannot be hostages to an unchanging past nor should we be fearful of an uncertain future. Yet, we all seem to be.

While driving (at or near the posted speed limit, mind you) I’d glance at the rear view mirror and saw the winding black ribbon of asphalt receding and when I switched my attention to the road ahead the pavement rushes by at the same rate. Our car, with us inside, was traveling through time and space – the receding road was the past, the road in front the future while the present moment was a fleeting wisp, shorter than a blink of an eye, or wheezing by the countryside at precisely the rate of 95.333 feet per second.  Thus the musing began.

Humans – of all the creatures around – are the only ones who worry about the future.  But then I must  first wonder about this.  Would events change or results alter in the future if there were only simple organisms around?  If there is no one to contemplate the future or learn from the past, does it make a difference?  The world seems to be what it is because we are here to contemplate, wonder, admire its beauty and sometimes be appalled by some of its ugliness.  I know too that there are as many ways to look at it as there are individuals who try to observe it through their eyes or colored glasses. The world is what it is because we are here to observe it. We worry about its future because it could affect us and those whom we care so much about. Therefore, if there is no one to worry about it, or care, what difference does it make what happens.  What events would change from and to what, when and how, or even where are only relevant to those who have the ability to think about them.

Driving through the vast U.S. highways makes one feel as insignificant as a single blood corpuscle running through a vein that is at one moment I-10, then I-59, later 90 or 93, etc., on a huge expanse of seemingly endless roads and landscapes.  Now, here's the thing. The planet we live in, a trifling droplet in a swirling sea of stars and galactic dust that make up the Milky Way, orbiting an ordinary star, has been around for about four billion years.  Our sun, a first or perhaps even a second generation star, has been around for only a third of the age of the universe.  History had gone on and events happened  when during much of the elapsed time there was no one to observe it; much less to record or critique it. So the past, our past in particular, is like an endless reel of film that has been running in a movie theater with no one watching for 99.9999999999999 per cent of the show.  Technically speaking, that is, because although the dinosaurs had been around for 160 million years of that time, there is no record of their observations, their culture and whether they worried at all after the asteroid hit the area we now call the Gulf of Mexico – a name that has existed for just a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond if the entire film lasted for a whole year.

If we are part of that reel of film and that it is running as we speak, we (our entire human history) appeared on it as a sliver the width of a human hair on a single frame of film. The future we are and will be worrying about is several millionth of a millionth the width of that sliver on that single frame that is about to unfold on the screen.  Despite what we hear from political speeches and rhetoric, ideological beliefs and ideal dreams of those who profess to worry about the world of future generations, the contextual time frame within which people contemplate the future is about one individual life span – short and sometimes even short sighted.  Yes, we say things such as, “we worry about our children and their children, the environment, the planet, will there be enough of our 401 K left over for our heirs, etc.,” but when the curtain of life descends to end the show for us we will no longer be around to read the review.

As musings go the mind wanders every which way and then I catch myself wondering what is the point of all these?  Oftentimes, in the course of an ordinary day, we all worry about the littlest of things and as is usually the case the things we worry about are far from what actually do happen.  Yet, we worry anyhow.  And not only do we worry about what is about to happen but we sometimes burden ourselves with the things that happened in the past.  Is that all there is then?  I think that the rigidity of our past, because we can no longer change it, is best used as a framework for the present to shape our pliable future.  Did I just write that?  A bit corny but you all know what I mean.

Of course, some of us just can’t seem to shake away the shackles and burden of where we came from, who we are by our family name or the place we grew up in or the school we graduated from.  For others the past is like a millstone on their necks which hold them back in ways that make their ability to move up and get ahead heavily weighted down. However, whether one was born with a silver spoon or found wanting of even the most basic necessities, time will “tic toc” with the same regularity for either one. Choice to use or waste time is what matters. One’s future is won or lost by just that one decision. Time is an intangible asset with real consequences without which no opportunity can ever be possible.

“The past is a ghost, the future is a dream, and all we ever have is now”, a comedian once said. The past cannot hurt us anymore unless we let it; future dreams are  untouchable until we get there, until all the tomorrows have become todays but the beauty of it is that we get the opportunity to prepare for it. What is interesting, of course, is that much of what we do today is almost always a preamble for the future. In fact, if we write down ten things we do today, for example, we will find that most of it are either preparatory for or things we need to complete in the future – an hour from now, tomorrow , days later, or for a much longer term.

This phenomenon we call the present moment - now - is about as fleeting as a blink of an eye.  The second we think of a second it’s gone.  But this has not stopped scientists from breaking down time into even much smaller basic units.  If we think a second is short, can you imagine how short a millisecond or nanosecond is? What about a femtosecond and a picosecond or attosecond?  Well, if those are not fleeting, what about the Planck unit?  There are more Planck units of time in one second than there are seconds in the age of the universe of 13.7 billion years.  From that, the present would seem like an illusion, the past is forever gone, and the future is all we have.

When someone says he or she has no future, or if we judge someone to not have any, nothing could be farther from the truth. The future is all we have and we all have it.  Though today we as individuals have been sculpted by our past, the greatest gift we can give ourselves for a better future is what we do at the present moment.  So, we shouldn’t waste a single femtosecond.