Past or present

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Dear reader, dear listener,

I stumbled upon an interesting question today. It goes something like this: What is it we are looking for? Is it living the best possible experiences? Or is it having the best possible memories about these experiences? Think about it…

And when you do so, realize that even though it may sound like it, this is not a journey vs. destination argument. The issue here is a psychological one. It is about how you deal with your journey. Do you deal with it as an experience or as a story? Are you almost perpetually living your life in the moment or do you surrender your conscience to the past? The way I’m laying out the question here, it may seem that the latter enjoys less of my esteem and that I honor the first option more.

But I am undecided. I know just as well as the next person that we will always have more past than present. And so I truly wonder how much I should sacrifice the one for the other. And even if the answer is “a lot of it” then to what extent should I sacrifice the present for the future? Because that is where it all comes together, isn’t it?

This kind of introspective mess is basically why I tend to forget every morning whether I turned off all the lights or not, closed the front door, sent out that important e-mail yesterday and, let’s face it, often come off as slow… Once again, caught up in the past.

Be that as it may, given that time is scarce and accepting that I am a fool running errands for my future self, I simply try to get around by planting seeds of meaning. Knowing that hundreds of them will be washed out by rainy days that  I cannot foresee, but hoping that maybe one or two of them will find a way to define themselves slowly, and that I will know I have been alive, in more than one place… because I have a few stories to tell.