Present Tense

As I sit here plotting my escape once again, I have a paradoxical “on hold” feeling.  I don’t feel like I’m doing anything at all but spinning and scheming.  I

have to remind myself of everything I actually am doing.  Why does what you’re doing get subsumed by what you’re not doing?  Everything you have eclipsed by everything you desire. 

Why is it so damn hard to live in the present – the ever-elusive present?  We seem to prefer the tinted, air brushed past, or the fantasy of a golden “someday” future.  Where does that propensity come from, what evolutionary survival need could possibly have created this common dynamic upon which

advertising companies feast?  Living in the present moment is a concept so radical, so elusive, that only “Masters”, those specially trained in isolative remote mountain peaks can even approach.
 
We are slaves to the future.  We are taught we must be properly prepared; build a nest egg, get our 401k’s, retirement accounts, college funds, Christmas clubs.  Save it up, save it all up for “someday.”  In the midst of that mad drive, we are allowed, encouraged even, to pause and revel in the past, look at home movies, pictures of frozen

moments that weren’t even enjoyed, appreciated, in those moments.  Now that they are the idealized “past” however, we are permitted to remember them oh so fondly, paint them in misty, romantic tints and hues, air brushed corrections carefully applied. 

Our movies, modern day harbingers of the gestalt, reinforce and dictate our

culture to this predilection.  Grand, fantastical futures are glorified; the past recreated and packaged.  The present?  Well, that can only be allowed in little “indie” films, depictions of a slice of life, quirky and quaint, hidden away in rapidly diminishing art houses.  A dinner and a conversation – the epitome of everyday life – is a wildly rash and bold concept for a movie.  Fantasy and action or history and nostalgia.  Any place but here, any time but now.  We have to move, forward or backward, just don’t linger here.

The same holds true for writing.  A firm and fast tenet of writing is action.  If a single sentence isn’t moving the action forward, off with its subject, object and verb agreement head.  The characters must be “doing” something.  The action must progress.  Dialogue can’t be like actual conversation.  It too

must be a mechanism for action and movement.  And why?  Because the reader will get bored, lose interest.  The story will lose momentum.  Does that mimic the way we actually live our lives?  Why the present tense is so uncomfortable that we’re constantly bolting away to the future or wallowing in the past?  What is it about the present tense that we can’t abide, that we must escape? 

I live this dynamic every day.  Is my present really so unbearable that planning, the incessant running, becomes my default life?  If you’re running, they can’t

catch you.  If you’re planning for a magnificent future where all your dreams will be realized, then the drudgery of the present where boring, torturous steps that must be taken to get what you long for, can be justified.  Understandable.  But what then becomes of life?  What would that headstone read?  “Here lie all her dreams.  Here all the running finally stopped.”  Enough already.

All we can do is remind ourselves, remind each other, of this day, each day.  Today I will finish this post.  I will work on a new short story I began.  I will

paint one wall.  I will cook a meal and savor it.  I will pick my ripe and bursting blueberries, wresting them back from the sparrows’ assault.  I will take my lunch in the garden with Ray Bradbury, where the sun finally emerging, will warm and soothe my restless yearning.

What are you doing today?