This Timeless Moment
“Live in the moment.” That timeless advice persists. Yet I don’t quite know what it means to do so, given that even pondering the answer takes more moments than one. At least, I think it does. How long is a moment, exactly? Writing about it will take countless more moments, hours, days. And how long in the past was that advice of living in the present moment first spoken? How long into the future will it echo? If I think about it all too much, I won’t stay present in the here and now.
As I see it, the paradox of living in the moment is that the more deeply we immerse ourselves in the present, the more expansive the past and future contained within it prove to be.
For instance, the sunlight breaking through this morning’s forest fog is very much in the moment. I’m in awe of its beauty, as I stand still in the cathedral of trees for a lengthy moment. Yet this moment’s light left the sun over eight minutes ago. The photograph of it will be from the past when you read this. The sunlight itself originates in solar processes billions of years old. Sunlight’s future is equally long, for the same light now illuminating our earth will only shine on distant edges of the universe billions of years later. So, which moment is this light living in? All of them at once, in my view at the moment. All of time seems encoded into the present. Time’s tiny fractals are embedded in its immense ones.
Time’s reflections of you, me, and our lives here are also encoded within that sunlight’s timeless string of moments. We will all someday be contained in the traces we leave on this earth. Our celebrations of this life will remain subtly vital, within those traces—whether or not the future notices our previous presence.
I keep thinking these thoughts as I pause again, along a favorite creekside rock formation. It’s all on a trail I first shared with my mother nearly fifty years ago. The personal memories embedded within this time and place are very present and real. They’ll continue to deepen within me, as long as my future continues.
As I look more deeply, the entirety of past and future reveals itself once more. The creek here has been flowing for thousands of years, and will continue to do so indefinitely. The ancient molecules of water within it have been present in shifting forms for as long as this planet has existed. The rocks upon which I stand are immeasurably ancient as well. And though the trees reflected in the water are less than a century old, the living lineage in which they’re rooted evolved long before any human arrived to make paper from wood, to create history books. If I’m living in this moment, I’m living within the entirety of time contained within it. That conclusion again cycles through me.
None of my thoughts are remotely new. They’re as cyclical as seasons. They’re a remembrance, not a discovery. Such thoughts were already an ancient observation long before poet William Blake summarized them so succinctly and timelessly, a few hundred short years ago: “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wildflower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.”
Yet the awe that descends within me in the new moment is very much in the present. The miracle of this ordinary, timeless moment leaves me nothing more to say, knowing that every word that’s ever been spoken or ever will be, is already contained within the silence.