“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
There is past; there is now.
But, no future.
I don’t mean that tomorrow won’t come (fingers crossed) but so far as our earth-bound bodies are concerned, it’s a chimaera.
Not to be too pedantic but you could make the same point about the past, save for the few points that I make herein.
Then again, it’s worth wondering about to the extent that right now with the G7 group, the hope-mongerers and the be-all-you-can-be Gang, you’d imagine we’ve got unlimited or certainly a lot of time to sort out our shit.
But we haven’t.
Time is running out — certainly qua homo sapiens sapiens.
(You wouldn’t think so (of course) judging by the way we live our lives.)
I thought, or is that prayed?, that CV-19 would be the course-correction our Civilisation needed to mend its Anthropocentric ways but it hasn’t worked out that way. I’m not negating the very real loss of life and the fact that nature was spared our most egregious habits (e.g. flying and driving) for a while but in case it’s not obvious, certainly in the UK, we’ve already begun to saddle up the business-as-usual horse with increasing alacrity. Just imagine if we’d discussed the idea of less, saving the seas and a complete ceassation of all fossil fuel extraction and acted on those exhortations. Wishful thinking I know.
Back to my opening points.
What if we said to ourselves that today is our last day on this earth. I don’t know, perhaps I can’t know how we’d act, but something tells me we’d go all out to have the time of our life. I don’t think we’d sit down, weep over our losses and regrets and say: “I’m never going to be an ancestor worth claiming given what I’ve done to the world.” That’s how I feel about my past behaviour. It stinks to high heaven and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. But then again, I wonder if this another way of not taking responsibility for the past and bypassing the grief and sorrow so as to not let it affect me too much?
I suppose if I’m trying to make a point it’s this: we’ve got too used to the idea of going to bed and waking up the next day. In other words, save for the terminally ill, those at the very end of their days or a sudden death, the rest of us think we’ve got, if not unlimited time, plenty of time to do our thing. And we might have had before we fouled our own nest but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I’m being too gloomy when I say that I’ve got this 6th sense that change, radical change, to our once pristine world is coming down the track and I’ve this nasty suspicion that when the end (for us) finally comes by dint, say, of the warming of the atmosphere or another catastrophic weather event, we won’t even see it.
In the end, though, how you live your life, is how you live your life. But I’m certain that the more I think about what I’m going to do in the future, the more likely it is I’ll act as if today is my last day. As to the past, well what I said about it at the start is already history; and the way I conceive of that now is almost as if my future, moment by moment, is my past, and I need to remember that the next time I screw up in my relationships or make another off-hand remark, sometimes made in jest, but of which I’m deadly serious.
Anyhow, it’s Sunday. Enjoy.
Take care, Julian