January 5, 2011
For all of my adult life I have heard the phrase “Live in the now” and even though it is associated with all the New Age voices that have been telling us how to live for the past several decades I have come to embrace it in my own way. I prefer to say, “Be present where you are” but in my mind the phrases are interchangeable.

Watching dementia slowly spread its wings, like the shadow of a great bird, over the small figure of my mother has recently caused me to pause and take another look at this notion. Dementia strips away memory. The short term loss is most readily noticeable but long-term is also going. Mom wakes up and doesn’t know what day it is. She asks the same basic questions every morning. Who is here? Has Zoe gone to work? What time is it? What am I supposed to do now? In one sense she is very much “in the now”.
She’s not thinking about what happened yesterday or the day before. She doesn’t have a game plan for the day. She is not ‘burdened’ by duties and responsibilities….or guilt and shame. She is literally ‘in the now’….very present where she is. Isn’t this exactly what the New Age gurus want to see in their disciples?

What is missing for mom, of course, is any sense of context. What I am witnessing is that the ‘the now’ without context is disturbing and sometimes terrifying to mom. ‘Being present’ without a context is about as far away from being ‘blissed out’ as one could get!

This brings me to my conclusion. The notion of ‘living in the now/being present where you are’, cut off from any discussion/awareness of context, is pap. I am present with a cup of tea and a laptop. I am ‘in the now’. But the context of this ‘being present’ is boundless! I think the mystics are closer to reality when they talk about all of time being present in one moment….but that discussion will be over a different cup of tea.

Now I am going to be present outside with my chainsaw….each moment an eternity of time! Ha!!