Now

is presently overrated

Photo: © David Whyte

NOW

is presently overrated. Now is not what it was and is also never what we think it is. There is no power of now: now does not have any power by itself. Now belongs as much to its past inheritance, to what brought it about, as it does to its just-about-to-happen future. Now is not where we are supposed to live, isolated from the poignant and maturing illusions of memory or the joyous lineaments of anticipation: ‘now’ does not exist without its astonishing past nor its dreamy, not-to-believed future: Now is a word that in the last twenty years has definitely got above itself. Most tellingly, and as a final condemnation: now is a word that has lost its sense of humour. Saying we should live totally in the now is just as amusing as saying we should live totally in the twelve-and-a- half minutes ago.

The call to live in the now is always accompanied by a grim form of dressed up puritanism. People who want us to live totally in the now want us to join their particular understanding of now, and very often to pay for the privilege. The now we are called to, we are told, is the only place to be, and not living in the now disqualifies us from entering the particular heaven on offer. The narrow cleaned up definition of now we are being presented with, hides the actual, underlying, raw and uncontrollable, subversive, not to be defined experience that lies behind the word. No, now is a word that does not like to be corralled or led by a singular understanding. The more emphatic our use of the word, and the more controlling its attempted meaning, the more it escapes our understanding. Now, like us, occupying the present just as we would like, needs to be left alone to be its multivalent, moveable, unnameable self.