Living in the moment

Nimue Brown

February 1

(Nimue)

I'm not a fan, honestly. I like the idea of being present for everything, but you can bring presence to a situation without trying to de-contextualise it. Context matters. We bring our knowledge, understanding and expectations to every moment we experience. It's a big part of how we know what to do. Being purely in the moment is safe enough when you're sat meditating, but you can't live like it - because we need our knowledge of what's harmful to us.

Acting ethically depends on a sense of past and future. You have to be able to see the scope for causality, and that what you do has consequences. Standing in your own power also requires this awareness. You can't act deliberately if you aren't in a conscious relationship with the past and the future and aware of how those relate to the present moment. You can free yourself from feelings of responsibility and obligation by living only in the moment and that is not a choice that leads to honourable actions.

Sometimes the whole notion of living in the moment depends on privilege. If you're confident that you don't have to think about the future, then either you are materially wealthy or you know that someone else will catch you. The 'providence' people living only in the moment depend on is mostly the labour and generosity of others.

Many people like to express the idea that animals and other creatures live only in the moment and that all this past/future business is just an unnatural human affectation. This is not so. All living creatures learn and depend on a certain amount of knowledge. Creatures can be traumatised, can be trained, and can anticipate things that they want. These things depend on a relationship with time. Hunting itself is an act of anticipation. Creatures will grieve for lost ones. There's nothing unnatural about being informed by the past or invested in the future.

To be present in the moment is to turn up with your whole self. You are the sum of your experiences. How you experience any moment is shaped by how you came to it. To be present is to bring this current experience into the narrative of your life and take it forward with you. It might make a very different kind of sense if you are trying to transcend this life and escape from body, physicality and lived experience. But that's not Paganism.

In practice we cannot separate ourselves from where we have been and where we are going. We can pretend to be free from the experience of time, and we can decline to think about the past or the future, but it doesn't get us far. It might have some value as a meditative practice, but like many things we do in meditation it's not something you can do all the time. To try and do so defies your animal relationship with the passing of time, in days, seasons and years. The wheel of the year turns, the seasons change, and to appreciate the ways in which one moment is not like another, we need to be present.

Appreciate what you have, make the best of every experience and be alive to the details of your own life. Be present.