10 May “Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.” [(M. AURELIUS) Daniel Klein]
“Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.”
MARCUS AURELIUS, ROMAN EMPEROR AND PHILOSOPHER
(AD 121–180),
STOIC
If Marcus Aurelius’s declaration has a familiar ring, it is because philosophers and religious thinkers have been saying more or less the same thing from time immemorial.
Be here now.
Be ever mindful.
Live in the present.
From modern philosophers, one of the clearest and most forceful iterations of this sentiment comes from Henry David Thoreau: “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
Clearly, we human beings must have great difficulty living mindfully in the present, otherwise why would so many philosophers feel the need to keep repeating the message?
On the face of it, fully engaging in the here and now does not sound that difficult. Here is right here in front of us. And it is now right now. So what’s the problem?
Some people drift away from the present by desiring something better than what exists here and now. Others, like me, drift away into “What’s next?” Another, more thoroughgoing way of avoiding full immersion in the present is by seeing all of life as stages of preparation, ranging from preparing for dinner to preparing for life in the Hereafter, with preparing for final exams falling somewhere in between. At the other extreme, there are those of us who persistently dwell in the past, with either nostalgia or regret or a mix of the two.
This drifting away from the present comes along with the human capacities of imagination and extended memory. We can always imagine our lives as different from what they actually are; we can always see alternatives. Apparently, that is a temptation that is hard for most of us to resist. Likewise, we can remember the way life was in the past, and chewing that over also seems irresistible.
Of course, a life with no anticipation of the future has serious drawbacks
The planning we humans do often takes up the bulk of our consciousness, particularly with our propensity for endlessly reviewing our plans like a looped soundtrack in our minds.
I suspect that there is something about living fully in the present that deeply frightens us. This dread might be right up there with Freud’s basic drive, the libido, as a basic condition of being human.
Indeed, those two conditions appear to complement each other: sex is one of the few dependable times when we are firmly engaged in the here and now.
But what could be the source of our fear of living in the present? One reason could be that we live in perpetual terror of being disappointed by our lives, indeed, by life itself. We know intuitively that life in the here and now is life’s ultimate—life cannot get any realer than right now. But what if we find the here-and-now life seriously lacking? What if it strikes us with the full force of “Is that all there is?” What if we find this ultimate reality uninspiring or, worse, hard, unfair, and painful? To deal with this fear of existential disappointment we make a preemptive strike on living in the present by reflexively imagining something different, by switching our consciousness to the future or past or to an imagined alternative life.
Another possible reason we refrain from living in the present is that it is fraught with intimations of our mortality. When we are fully immersed in the here and now, we become profoundly aware of the unstoppable progression of time and change. Most of us have experienced highly charged moments of bliss occasioned by simple events—a sudden appearance of a flock of doves overhead; an astonishing performance of a passage of music; an enchanting smile on the face of a passing stranger.
These moments are fleeting. That is an essential part of their intensity. But these fleeting moments leave us with a bittersweet awareness that everything ends. And with that awareness comes the inescapable knowledge of our personal finitude. We are fully cognizant of the fact that the sum of our here-and-now moments will reach their end and then we will be no more.
Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It
Daniel Klein
