We all know the clichés: Seize the day. Don’t waste today. Live in the now.
They encourage curbing our fixation on the future.
Whatever merit they once held, the sayings no longer inspire. In a pandemic, we live with too much of now – and far too little of tomorrow. Now is getting old.
The future once was the kaleidoscopic panorama against which to practice our now. The future embodied possibility. It gave context to now, context that brought meaning to seizing each moment.
But uncertainty has dimmed the future. We view it today from our isolation bubbles as if looking through a straw whose far end is plugged with mud. We can’t see past now and can’t summon even a hazy visage of tomorrow. No more panorama.
Control is the problem, the lack of it. Will the pandemic end? And when, damn it? Will the old normal return? Or are we trapped in our forever now, our wan and bland today?
The answers lie out there, beyond comprehension, in the dim and featureless future.
Welcome to the purgatory of now.
Nice. I sometimes wonder how my mentally disabled sisters process the pandemic. In their world, they do not look ahead. They are always in the now. There are never better days ahead. Just days, all the same.