The Only Neighborhood You Have Ever Lived In

You may have traveled widely. You may have a passport full of stamps, memories of mountains and coastlines and cities on the far side of the world. But there is one sense in which you have never gone anywhere at all.

You have never left the eternal now.

Test it

This is something you can check for yourself, right now, without taking anyone's word for it.

Try to remember a moment from your childhood. Hold it in your mind. Now notice where the remembering is happening. It is happening now. The memory may be of then, but the experience of having it is present. You have never once had a memory in the past. Every memory you have ever had, you had in the present.

Now try to imagine tomorrow. Picture where you will be, what you will do. Notice where the imagining is happening. Now. You have never once been in the future. Every time the future arrived, it arrived as the present.

The past and the future are real, in their way. He and she are the main event. But they are not places you have ever been. They are what lies on either side of the only place you have ever been.

One neighborhood

So the eternal now is your only neighborhood. You were born into it, you have lived every moment of your life in it, and you will die in it. Every encounter, every love, every loss, every ordinary Tuesday afternoon took place here.

This is also, not coincidentally, where the Reality Equation lives. Reality is something you experience, and you experience it only now. Actual arrives now. Expectation is brought now. The quotient lands now. You act now. And the history you make passes, now, across the edge into her.

Why we forget

If this is so obvious, why does it feel strange?

Because so much of our attention is spent elsewhere. We rehearse the past and preview the future so constantly that we come to feel as though we live in those places. We think of ourselves as carrying a past behind us and walking toward a future ahead, and we forget that the only ground under our feet is this.

That forgetting is not a failure. It is part of how a particular someone navigates a world. Your Prediction runs on the past and points toward the future. It has to. But it is worth remembering, from time to time, that Prediction is happening now too, and that the past it draws on and the future it points toward are both, from where you stand, out of reach.

The edge

Here is how I picture it.

There is an edge, the event horizon we spoke of earlier, where his love meets her stillness. Everything on one side is possibility, unseen. Everything on the other side is finished, sealed. And the edge itself, the meeting place, is now.

You live on the edge. You are always on the edge. The edge does not move through time; time, if you like, is the edge's way of describing its own activity. Things arrive from one side and cross into the other, and you are the place where the crossing is felt.

What this does for love

I want to say what this has to do with love, because otherwise it is only a curiosity.

If you have only ever lived now, then you have only ever loved now. Every act of love you have ever performed, you performed in the present. Every act of love you have ever received, you received in the present. And every one of those acts has since crossed into the past, where it is permanent.

So the present is the only place love can be done, and the past is the only place it can be kept. You are standing, always, at the one spot where love is both made and given over to permanence.

That is not a small thing. It means that this moment, the one you are in as you read this sentence, is not a waiting room for some future when you will finally love well or finally be loved. It is the place itself. There is no other.