We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
— JUDY GARLAND
One of the strongest habits of the mind is its ceaseless foray into the imaginary world of the future. How much time do we spend ruminating, worrying, and imagining a catastrophe about a future scenario that never actually happens? We can spend hours lost in daydreams and fantasies about plans that never actualize. How many moments do we spend rehearsing a discussion with a loved one or our boss? Then when that conversation happens, it always unfolds differently than the way we had carefully planned.
How often do you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat worrying about some potential disaster, such as the stock market crashing or a family member getting hurt? The mind frequently creates stories about the future that catapult us into a fight-or-flight response, sending adrenaline coursing through our veins as we anticipate a catastrophe. Such mental machinations are wearisome. The poet Hafiz framed it well: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I’d like to see you living in better conditions.”
The irony is that this dizzying speculation is about a future reality that doesn’t exist! Mystics have expounded on the illusion of time for centuries and pointed to its mirage-like nature. Yet humans have carved up time into the concept of past, present, and future, which we take to be very real. But do such classifications really exist outside of our clocks and calendars?
From a phenomenological perspective, the present is the only moment that we know directly, so do past and future exist anywhere but in our heads? Is time just a mental construct? The concept of time is a helpful convention that allows us to prepare for what is to come and review what has occurred. What has happened in the past is not fictitious, and yet it now only exists in our imagination or in history books. Certainly, only humans divide time into seconds, minutes, days, and years. Such divisions often reflect the cycles of nature — each day matches the earth’s rotation and each year its orbit of the sun — yet beyond these clocks and concepts, the actual experience of time can still seem mirage-like.
Nevertheless, the brain is hardwired to anticipate future events as a means of survival. Remembering what has occurred and anticipating what might occur can be an extremely useful skill. We have thrived as a species for millennia partly due to this ability. We can prepare for the hard winters ahead; we can anticipate droughts and plan for food shortages. This beats scavenging what is available in the frozen ground of winter. The brain is amazingly adept at preparing for the inevitable uncertainties of life.
Take, for example, climate change. Our ability to imagine and anticipate — to create models of future sea level changes and rising temperatures for this century — allow us to see the urgency of this impending crisis and to recognize that radical, scalable solutions are needed now for the survival of all species. Understanding the changes and impacts that are possible can help us create solutions to this potential catastrophe. But there is a difference between anticipating future needs — such as by saving for retirement — and predicting the future. We can never actually know what will happen. We need to remember that whatever future scenarios we imagine are at best predictions, a reasonable calculation of possibilities, a set of potential scenarios.
This is one reason this ability is also a source of stress. While anticipating disaster can help us prepare for calamity, we can also fret about all sorts of future scenarios that will never come to pass. Further, anxiety and worry are not in themselves helpful: they can actually thwart constructive action. Such feelings can steal us away from the riches of the present moment. Too often, we can get so stirred up with fear and angst about what we anticipate — whether we are imagining something realistic and unavoidable, like our own mortality, or something fantastical and unlikely to ever happen, like a meteor strike — that we fail to pay attention to what is before us.
If our concepts of the future are clearly constructs in our mind, so too is the past. We sometimes treat the shrine of memory as infallible and wholly accurate, as if memory were nothing but a raw data bank of facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our past is also “made up,” a particular story we create by choosing and putting together only certain aspects of events and slices of memories.
We do this in the same way we make movies. During a film’s production, hundreds of hours of footage are shot, and this is edited and manipulated into a two-hour narrative that evokes, say, the sinking of the Titanic. When it comes to our lives, our brain also picks and selects, edits and manipulates, in order to create a narrative of our personal history. We don’t remember everything that happened, and what we recollect can be easily distorted by a few salient events. These can cast a light across all of our memories that slants our perspective into a particular story.
For instance, I have a few poignant memories of being psychologically bullied by close friends in high school, and this created a painful impression that cast a shadow over my teenage years. Afterward, and for some time, I looked upon that time with the view that I was living in a harsh, dog-eat-dog world. Moments of being bullied were rare, but they were significant enough that they dominated my mind, which replayed them often and constructed a painful narrative of adolescence. Today I can look back and see that this story, though it felt true then, was incomplete and inaccurate. Sometimes, it takes hearing another perspective — such as from a therapist or from someone else who was involved — to see an alternative vantage point, which can radically change our past narratives.
Much research has been done on the distortion of memory within the world of criminal investigation. An illuminating radio series on National Public Radio called Serial explored the world of a young man, Adnan Syed, who had been accused of murdering his girlfriend. He and his closest friends were asked to recollect all of their movements on a particular Monday afternoon, eleven weeks before, during an interview by police detectives. The radio host posed the question to listeners about whether they could remember exactly what they had been doing on the afternoon of a specific day three months ago. How accurate would your memory and recollection be?
We now know that identifications in “perpetrator lineups” can be horribly inaccurate. Innocent people have been sentenced to decades of prison time because of the faulty or biased memories of eyewitnesses to a crime. We assume that people recall accurately, but they often don’t, and eyewitness statements are now considered insufficient to uphold a conviction.
The stories we tell ourselves about the past can be sources of great pain or delight. From the perspective of mindfulness, we learn to hold all of our thoughts, ideas, and perceptions lightly. Thoughts, as the Zen saying goes, are like fingers pointing to the moon, but they are not the moon. Yet how easily we mistake our thoughts for reality. In meditation I instruct students to see that the thought of their foot is not their foot; it is just an idea, a mental representation. A thought about the future or the past in the same way is not actually real. It is only a fleeting mental image or memory. The extent that we mistake them for reality determines to some degree how much power they will have to affect us.
With practice we can learn to hold all thoughts of past and future with a spacious awareness. Our memories can inform us in helpful ways. They can be moments to cherish, like seeing our children take their first steps or recalling beautiful sunsets. And they can be the source of heartache, such as actions we regret or traumatic events from the past.
Lastly, all our measurements of time can fool us into thinking time is an object, something we can carve up or lose. We can live with an ever-increasing fear that time is running out or worry that there will never be enough of it. Ironically, we are in an age in which time is the most precious commodity, more valuable than money. The speed of life, of business and communication, has clearly increased, in large part due to our digitally connected world. With our smartphones and communication devices, we expect others and ourselves to be connected and responsive anytime, anywhere.
Alternately, slowing down, being present, and bringing awareness to our moment-to-moment experience allow us to see that all our rushing will never gain us “more time.” We have to taste, directly, immediately, that time is both expansive and available. Our experience of time is directly determined by our perception and conception of it.
Through awareness and contemplative meditation, we discover how we live in a seamless, timeless present. Our direct experience of reality is that the past, present, and future all happen in this eternal now. Think about this: Where does the future happen? Through thoughts in our mind that arise in this moment. And where is the past? It is gone, except for memories and influences flitting through our mind and heart in the present. All is happening right here, right now.
When we see that, we understand that all we can do is be present for and take care of this moment. This is all there is and ever was. When we get this, we slip out of the prison of time scarcity and panic about the future. Life is simply a series of experiences unfolding in this ever-present moment. To know this is to be released from the trap and burden of the concept of time.
• PRACTICE •
Mindfulness of Time — Exploring Past and Future
Establish yourself in a comfortable meditation posture. Close your eyes and bring attention to your immediate experience. Observe how the five senses are only happening in the present. Notice how sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch happen only in this moment. See how the gift of sensory stimuli — like the sound of birds, the movement of breath, the smell of coffee, the shafts of sunlight coming through a window, the tastes in your mouth — invite you into the present over and over. The sound of traffic outside is not happening in the past or future. We can recall a previous experience of hiking in the mountains or imagine a future one, but even those thoughts are happening in our mind in this moment.
Remain aware of your unfolding experience of breath, body, sounds, and sensations. Notice how easily the mind’s attention drifts from the sensory present into the conceptual mind, which imagines and prepares for the future. If your thoughts drift to planning, observe how real that future experience feels. Watch how easily you become absorbed in a world that feels as real as your body breathing. Can you see that the future scenario is just a thought? Mindfulness practice helps you wake up from this dream over and over again.
Similarly, notice if you start reminiscing. Observe how that experience feels real, as if you are actually reliving it. We get as lost in our memories as we do in our fantasy; they both seem equally real and compelling. Mindfulness helps us see and release such meanderings, so we return to the aliveness and preciousness of the present. With this awareness, observe how two-dimensional these past and future journeys are compared to the richness of the here and now.
As you end the meditation, stay cognizant throughout your day of when you become lost in a future landscape or mired in memories. Notice how they take you away from this unique moment. The more you unhook from these habits in your day, the less often you will choose to be lost in these imaginary worlds, both in meditation and in your life.
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