Learning to Live in the Present

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In a previous post, we examined the anxiety inherent in the human condition. Our capacity for self-reflection, we argued, causes us to often dwell upon the various possibilities that lie both before and behind us. Fixating on what could happen or what could have happened draws our attention away from what we are experiencing at any given moment, increasing our angst about the future and our remorse over the past.

For the 19th-century existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, human beings exist in the tension between anxiety and despair—the former being a kind of dread over what we fear might be, the latter being a dissatisfaction with the way things are. Kierkegaard’s thought was deeply influenced by the writings of St. Augustine, whose Confessions remains one of the most probing works of self-examination ever written.

In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine meditates on the psychological experience of time and how it shapes our self-understanding. Time, he notes, is typically thought of as being divided into past, present, and future.

If we examine this division more closely, however, we soon realize that it is a poor representation of the true nature of things. Past, after all, is simply the name we give to events that no longer exist. And future is the name for what does not exist yet.

By Augustine’s reckoning, the present is the only expression of time that can be said to have any existence at all. Past and future are constructions of the mind, the former being imaginings of things remembered, the latter being imaginings of things expected. “The past,” he writes, “is not now present and the future is not yet present.” How then can either be said to be?

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Extrapolating from this, Kierkegaard insists that dwelling upon an unreal past cannot but lead to despair, while agonizing over an equally illusory future causes profound anxiety. The solution, this depiction of time seems to imply, is to learn to live in the present—a suggestion that might just as easily come from today’s self-help gurus as from a pair of history’s greatest thinkers. Naturally, the situation is more complicated than this.

As Augustine soon recognizes, the present is just as tenuous as the past and the future. It exists for only an instant, that fleeting moment when “time flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration.” The present, Augustine writes, “occupies no space,” and time itself is that which “comes from what as yet does not exist [the future], passes through that which lacks extension [the present], and goes into that which is now non-existent [the past].” Even the present, it would seem, barely exists at all.

Can We Really Ever "Live in the Present"?

If we accept this depiction of humanity’s time consciousness and admit that our experience of time is structured in such a way as to rack us between the poles of anxiety and despair, we must ask whether it is even possible to live in the present, transient as it may be. Certainly, we have all had experiences that have freed us from our inner angst and enabled us to feel wholly present to the person or encounter at hand. Such epiphanies are often fleeting, but they exist all the same. When we experience them, we lose sight of ourselves and become deeply engaged with the world around us.

For Augustine, this is the work of attention, our innate capacity to be present in the present and attend to that which presents itself to us. Attention is the foundation of experience—we can only encounter that which we give our attention to—and it is the seat of time itself, containing both memories of the past and expectations of the future, even as the latter gives way to the former.

It is by choosing what to attend to that we become more fully alive, more in touch with “the astonishing reality of things, beings, and persons,” as a group of attention activists called The Friends of Attention write in their recent book 12 Theses on Attention.

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An example may help to illustrate the point. Imagine yourself on a hike in the woods. What do you see? What do you smell? How does the ground feel beneath your feet?

Attend a bit more closely. What brings itself forth? What beings present themselves to you? What are they saying? How do they draw you out of yourself into a world mysteriously inhabited by others?

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Now, recall a recent encounter you’ve had with nature. Maybe you went to the beach or to a local park or for a walk around your neighborhood. Were you listening to music? Scrolling through social media? Taking a picture of the sunset rather than attending to the brilliance of the sky as it revealed itself in red and gold?

In so doing, you were still utilizing your capacity for attention. But you may not have been aware of what your attention was being expended upon. In some ways, you were being present—present to the sounds coming through your earpods and the lights flashing across your screen. But with your attention directed toward your devices, what passed by unnoticed? What revealed itself without being seen?

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The Miracle of Attention

For the 20th-century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, the proper aim of education is the formation and cultivation of attention. According to Weil, attention, rightly directed, is a kind of miracle, a holy experience, something akin to prayer. It is an opening to the present moment, a window into life as it really is.

Even as time passes from an unreal future to a nonexistent past, attention offers us an opportunity to flourish, to come fully to life at every moment we are given. And that, Augustine would agree, is an authentically human experience of time.