In the upcoming year make your ‘now’ meaningful

With New Year’s Day just around the corner, offering a spanking new collection of 365 days, what do you plan to do with yours?

It’s time to reflect upon time, the strange structure that governs the passing of our lives – said lives sometimes barely noticed, barely attended to.

And then the year is done. And we wonder at the all too small collection of moments worth savoring. Where did they go and how did they pass us by?

Answer: We lost the present. The gift of the now.

All of us live in exactly the same moment, no matter how short or long our lives. That is, we live solely in the now, and it is the quality of our nows that determine, to a large degree, through what lens we view both what has been and what will, or might, be.

This “now” business is a bit of a paradox that you might try to solve by saying, “Hey, party on.” But then its two illusory heavyweights – past and future – weigh in on your prospective Bud commercial.

“Illusory” because you can’t point to them. I can’t locate, “This is the past, this is the future,” and yet my experience tells me that both exist. Yes they do, but only in the now.

The gift and curse of being human is being aware of being aware – i.e., self-conscious. The gift is hope for and the curse fear of, the future, and how we respond in the now creates our past.

Which, of course, we can examine the same way: hopeful for the good we find, fearful of … the less savory bits.

Practicing a meaningful now builds a richness of yesterdays, rewards and informs us in the present, and makes our tomorrows more bearable and, hopefully, more hopeful.

And this practice also yields, over the years, a rich store of knowledge and a deep well of experience. And knowledge plus experience equals wisdom, the reward and wealth of living well enough, long enough. Wisdom is congruent with living well.

This reminds me of Albert Borgmann’s analysis of the “good life” and the “person of excellence.”

Borgmann, a University of Montana philosophy professor, makes a distinction between tools that put us at a distance from meaningful activities and the actual practice of said pursuits – what he calls “focal practices” or “focal things.”

Let’s say you’re watching the Food Network while eating a microwave pizza. You’re totally into a technological event, eating industrial food “cooked” for you by a device, watching someone else’s experience through another gizmo.

Now, suppose instead that you’re in your own kitchen, showing one of your kids how to make pizza dough. The dough would be the thing, and what you’re doing with it is the practice.

Focal practices require time and commitment – or, as Borgmann would say, have a “high threshold.” The food channel and bad pizza are “low threshold,” technologically aided experiences; activities that are easy to engage in, indeed, are pretty much the norm.

Borgmann’s not an enemy of technology per se, but is highly critical of its impingement upon focal practices. He utilizes our Western classical tradition to sketch out the various excellences required to live a good life.

Cultural historian Morris Berman nicely sums up Borgmann’s thesis, so I’ll let him do the talking for a bit:

•He or she is a world citizen – that is, someone who knows a fair amount about the world (science and history, in particular).

•He or she seeks both physical valor and intellectual refinement.

•He or she is accomplished in music and versed in the arts.

•He or she is charitable – i.e., aware that real strength lies not in material force, but in the power to give, forgive, help and heal.

Berman naturally asks how we stand up to these ideals, and the answer – that we’re “not a nation devoted to the pursuit of excellence” – is pretty obvious.

Hold on, though, it’s worse than that. Berman concludes, “The overwhelming majority of Americans are simply not interested in the life of the mind, and in a participatory sense not terribly interested in the life of the body. What else is left?”

Indeed.

Witness our last eight years under the Decider’s regime, as great a testimony to lack of excellence that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, unrivaled in its puerile hatred of sharing the good life with all.

Despicable. But plenty of reason to revel in that first momentous moment of the New Year, come Jan. 20. Hallelujah!