Living in the Past

I think we've all met a person who seems fixated on the past. Such people don't seem "with it" and have a great amount of difficulty dealing with people and situations in the here and now. We tend to think that people like this need psychiatric help.

It dawned on me last night that such individuals are not atypical at all. No, what we view as abnormal only is the breadth of their fixation. It's only when the past they refuse to let go of is from a different era or a decade or two ago that we say they've "lost touch with reality".

Every person's mind lives in the past. Each time we encounter anything in life, our minds are able to interpret stimuli and thoughts only AFTER they have taken place. Sprinters don't begin to run the exact moment the starter's pistol is fired. It takes a fraction of a second for the mind to compute the sound before impelling one's feet to get in gear.

When we hear a song on the radio, our minds are always half of a beat behind as we listen to the words and music. Because we recognize the melodic chords or the words of the song, it only seems that we are in the present.

In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Allan Watts States that,

"From one point of view, each moment is so elusive and so brief that we cannot even think about it before it has gone. From another point of view, this moment is always here, since we know no other moment than the present moment. It is always dying, always becoming past more rapidly than imagination can conceive."

The only way to live IN the moment is turn off our minds and allow our brains and other senses to encounter the present. This process is often referred to as meditation.