Heroes Not Zombies

For me, this is a photo of flow. It’s a still image, and you might say if I wanted to illustrate flow I’d be better sharing a video but I like the juxtaposition of stillness and movement which this single frame shows us.

There’s a lot of advice to live in the present moment, to “be here now”, to draw your attention into the current time and space. I know, I’ve shared such advice many times. I get the value of it. But there’s a paradox at its heart which we often ignore.

Life, time, and reality, is not divided into neat frames. It doesn’t exist as a series of isolated, bounded, limited, even disconnected pieces. So when we stop to think about what we actually mean by “the present” or even “this moment”, it rapidly becomes hard to pin down. Does the present moment last for a minute? Does it last a few seconds? Does it last only for a fraction of a second? Isn’t it the case that the very act of reflecting on the present turns into a reflection on the past……ok, maybe the immediate, very close, past, but the past, all the same. And where does the future come from? If it isn’t sitting waiting for us like the next train station along the line (and I don’t think it is), if it is, rather, “emergent”, that is created out of the present moment, then, again, as we stop to reflect on this moment, we pretty quickly find it’s being changed by the future unfolding before our very eyes.

No, the truth is that life, time and reality are more like flow than frames.

I’ve wondered about that too when looking at a river. Exactly what is a river? If it’s the water in it then that water is constantly flowing right by. It doesn’t stay. If it stayed, it wouldn’t be a river, it’d be a stagnant pond. (actually even stagnant ponds don’t stay the same!) So is it the course of the flow of the water? In other words the actual path which the water traces out? The banks of the river? Not so sure about that either, because if you look at old maps, or even some aerial photographs, you can see that the so-called “same” river changes its shape and direction continuously, sometimes in small ways, and at other times in starkly dramatic ones!

The Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, says that

A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

In other words, the way out of this dilemma is not by trying to pint down our experience, label it a and stuff it into separate boxes. Instead, we just need to think of the world being made up of “networks of kisses”. Life is “made” of “events”.

Events are happenings. The don’t have terribly easy start and finish points, and even those points which we can see turn out to be inextricably bound up in networks of other relationships and happenings. Nothing exists in isolation.

I like this view of life. I like the practice of becoming more aware in the present by becoming more aware of the flows of energy, information and forms around me. I like the focus on “becoming not being” – as you’ll see at the top of the blog.