Can you ever live in a moment other than now?Time is how we measure distance from now-ness, and it’s entirely relational. There are people on Earth right now living on Mars time, and they have jobs and stuff.¹
Our meatsuits only live in the sensory now. My aching back doesn’t understand why it should have done stretches yesterday to avoid future pain. It only knows about the pain now, and it’s looking for a solution at now o’ clock.
Life is an ever present dream of becoming. When I take care of myself physically in the now, I change into a different person, one who takes care of themselves every day.
Gladwell’s rule of 10,000² seems daunting to some, it kept me from getting out of my chair for a long time. When I was young, I wanted to be famous because it sounded fun. The path to get there was picking up my guitar every day and practicing, and practice was less fun than the dream in my head.
What 10,000 really describes is a stable state of being. Do you know how many days go by in the average human life?
How many careless, insensitive acts will I perform 10,000 times in my life?And that’s merely a single blink of consciousness, a life, among a long chain of blinks that is my ancestry and progeny. All dreaming the same dream, slowly becoming me.
10,000 is such a small number on the mathematical scale of the universe. I can’t recall exactly who I was 30 years ago, but I can clearly see the pattern of repetitive actions that led me here.
Ray Kurzweil used the idea of patternism to reverse his Diabetes II³ by eating the same thing every day and taking lots of vitamins. Illness is a superposition of states, between healthy and dead.
Sometimes the inconsistencies are out of our control, and sometimes they are entirely our responsibility.
So there is nothing to wait for. Be the person you need to be right now, because otherwise it will never happen. If your meatsuit tells you about a problem, pause before you go to your default painkiller, and ask yourself.. How could I change my pattern right now to move toward pleasure, out of pain, and stay there?
Don’t fall into a daydream of what the future might look like. “Future you” doesn’t exist. When Ram Dass said be here now⁴, he didn’t say be here and do nothing. Ram Dass published twelve books (at least, that’s what ChatGPT told me).
So be here. Do something. Now.¹ COMIC: How living on Mars time taught me to slow down, Matthew Cloutier, LA Johnson, Anuj Shrestha — https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1112484935/nasa-engineer-nagin-cox-mars-rover
²Malcolm Gladwell Says it Takes 10,000 Hours to Master Something, Michelle Monet — https://medium.com/music-voices/malcolm-gladwell-says-it-takes-10-000-hours-to-master-something-38acf02452fa
³Google Engineer Ray Kurzweil Thinks We’ll Cheat Death In This Lifetime. Here’s Why, Brian Walsh — https://www.prevention.com/life/a20457674/why-ray-kurzweil-thinks-well-cheat-death-in-this-lifetime/
⁴Be Here Now — The Story of a Book, Sondra Murphy — https://beherenownetwork.com/be-here-now/
