I subscribe to the Buddhist idea that happiness arises from living fully in the present moment. Yet as a subscriber to this idea, which I know to be true, everything I see and do, and virtually anything anyone says to me, triggers an avalanche of memories, which I then have to dig out from under in order to get back to living fully in the present moment.
Einstein wrote: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. This suggests that the past must be part of the present moment, in which case living fully in the present moment must entail simultaneously living in the past.
Of course the Buddhist idea about living fully in the present moment is an idea, an ideal, a practice. Even the most advanced enlightened Buddhist occasionally dwells on events and feelings from the past. In fact, neurologically speaking, we are the end results of our past actions.
I’m not speaking of karma – our actions determining the courses of our lives – a notion I also subscribe to. I’m speaking about Brain Maps. Having read a bunch of fairly up-to-date books about neuroscience, it is now understood that every time we do something or think something or see something, our brains make a little synaptic map of that something. If we repeat the action or thought, or see the same view out the kitchen window over and over again, those synaptic maps get etched deeper in our brains.
And if we repeat an action or a thought or see the same thing thousands of times, those brain maps dictate responses in us so automatic they resemble innate reflexes. This is why when you play a piece of music once, your playing will be tentative compared to the hundredth time you play that same piece of music. The brain map directing your body/mind/spirit for the playing of that piece gets etched more deeply into your neurological system with each playing, and your fingers/body/actions in that regard become vastly more proficient as a result.
Thus: we become what we do over and over again.
So here we are aspiring to live fully in the present moment while being, in large part, made of what we were, because what we were created the mechanics of how we operate in the present moment. By the same token, if we spend lots of time thinking about the future, those thoughts will shape who we are now!
So when I’m schlepping firewood from the woodshed to the north porch, practicing being mindful as I place those pieces of wood into the wheelbarrow, and as I gaze in wonder at the leaves and clouds and blades of grass as I wheel my wheelbarrow along the path, and a memory of a girl I was too shy to pursue when I was sixteen drifts into the matrix of my brain maps, I can’t help but feel her appearance as part of the totality of the present moment.
And now the time has come to make my list of things I’ll buy at the grocery store in the near future. To make this list I will pay close attention to what we no longer have because we ate those things in the past. Thus past, present, and future collide in the kitchen and reverberate throughout the universe in every direction and in myriad other dimensions, too. Caramba!
fin