Displaced

A Meditation on Future and Time

To perform a hideous deed, a man must tell himself that he has already done it; he must force upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. —

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Branching Paths, as translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni (Source: Libraryofbabel.info)

We’ve become so accustomed to not living, always projecting, beyond our immediate reality.

Everything became the same. An hour is followed by another in perpetual repetition, seemingly identical. The sun, the sky, the clouds seem the same moment after moment. We barely notice the passage of the seasons. The fallacy of the future displaced us from our present. A future promising to modify our past. Let’s consider this for a moment.

We are displaced from reality by the idea of time.

The only reality is this now. Our recollection of what we call the past is incomplete, fragmented, altered by our present emotions. The kiss that was sweet yesterday turns bitter now when the lover is no longer with us.

The future alters our present, by the promise of the return of the loved one to us.

We assume this will happen. That the train, the plane, the car will arrive with the loved one, to return it to our arms.

We assume the sun will rise, the children will grow, and the harvest will produce a crop.

We need assumptions to work in our present state. These assumptions blind us to the ever-changing nature of reality.

I run these same trails, day after day, season after season, but they are never the same, while they are still the same. In the technical sections, I know where to step and position my feet every single day. I know the blind spots where to look for other hikers or mountain bikes coming full blast.

Nevertheless, it is never the same trail. I notice this especially at sunset or twilight when nothing is what it seems, as the sun rises and begins to cast out the shadows of the night, the dirt pebbles assume a lunar quality to them. Sometimes I notice a cactus that was not there the day before.

Sometimes the mountain assumes the quality of an ocean. But let’s not give ourselves the poetic license that we crave for today.

If I run the trail in a counterclockwise fashion, its identity changes completely, I lose my bearings, and I no longer know where to step. I need to pay attention now.

We have lived our lives with too many assumptions built into them. And now these assumptions have been challenged collectively, to the whole of society.

We always suspected our lovers would not love us forever, that if we were lucky, the relationship would evolve with us.

How many of us can claim that after any number of years in the same relationship, we go to the encounter of the lover with the same passion and desire than the first time we discovered their bodies.

We assume that in our reality, time will perpetuate itself when our existence is ever-evolving and changing.

The bird singing outside is singing now.

If I decide not to listen to it because I assume it will sing again tomorrow, I am deceiving myself. I am only working with assumptions, unknowns I tell myself they will occur. Unknowns over the ones I have no control.

I can wish for the bird to sing tomorrow, as I can yearn for Friday to come, but these are only desires and hopes of a displaced reality because all we have is now, and tomorrow never comes, and when what we think it was tomorrow arrives, it then will be now. And it will not be as the future we imagined that it was as misplaced as the past.

The same as the vacation we took to the place that looked so well in pictures, but it was not what we expected when we arrived because we added assumptions to the unknown. Like the heat, or the cold, or the sound of the wind against palm trees, or the sun with a particular light, present in our imagination, constructed but not lived.

We imagined the vacation spot so different from our then reality that we were enduring in the place where we existed in our then present, but we forgot about the humidity, the ants, and the rude clerk at the hotel, or the cab driver who did not want to give us change.

We construct these realities in our imagination that are no different than the fiction we read when we read War and Peace.

And now, we have been awakened. Collectively and unceremoniously to this new now that is happening right this moment.

My mobile device keeps on alarming me of a flight that will probably not take place. American Airlines flight 253 from LAX to Maui will not depart on June the third. According to Flight Radar, it has not done so for at least the last fourteen days.

We have given too much importance to our plans, and we have forgotten the universe is way bigger than us. And that the minuscule, even the unseen, can change the course of our lives, and our best-laid plans.

Another man said this, ‘do not worry about tomorrow, each day has enough trouble on its own.’ Every moment is its own, and we need to reclaim it. Make it our own. Embrace it.

These words travel through time. You will read them in a different now than the one I wrote them in. My reality will be different then. Unless our essence it’s always changing and the same because of the enormity and indivisibility of time.

©Pablo Pereyra 2020. Thank you for reading and taking an interest in these words.

In response to Blue Insights Cultural Prompts — June 2020