It’s pretty clear that the present changes constantly. You can’t nail it down. This present moment constantly appears out of the future and disappears into the past right before our eyes.
It’s also pretty clear that the future changes constantly. Have you ever looked at a 10 day weather forecast and noticed how when day 10 becomes day 9 the forecast often changes too? In fact the further out you gaze you less likely you can see clearly what lies ahead. It’s not, it seems to me, that the future lies ahead set solidly in place just waiting for us to get there and find it. No, the model of the future as an infinite matrix of singularities constantly flickering and waving in and out of potential existence, yes, that works for me.
But the past…..well it’s easy to think of the past as done and dusted isn’t it? I mean you can’t go back and run it again, can you? However, looking at this jet trail makes me think the past isn’t so fixed after all. As I watch where the plane has been and see both the direction and shape of the trail it laid, I see that trail change before my eyes.
Well, you know, it seems to me the past doesn’t lie in some filing cabinet in our brain. Nobody has ever found such a “thing”. Memory, it turns out, is a creative process which involves imagination, attention and the ability to make a past event anew.
History isn’t a simple matter of just finding the facts, is it? We explore, put attention and effort in particular places, ignore or discard others, and we tell a new story of times gone by.
At a kind of simple level I often said to patients who had suffered a great hurt or loss, that we can’t change or erase what happened but we can alter our relationship to it. We can change our experience of it.
Everything changes. Nothing is fixed.
Heroes Not Zombies 
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