This week I played with known and expected future events. Simple events like watching the alarm clock move from 6:44 to 6:45 and knowing that I must get up and at the same time experiencing that I am standing up. The transition a helpful marker of one experience of “now” moving into the past and regrettably no longer accessible (I was still pretty tired). The day is filled with many of these seemingly insignificant transitions that punctuate the day and our experience of time. Knowing that a future event is imminent seemed to make time more tangible. When the event was something pleasant the anticipation made time feel more alive. Surprisingly experiencing my dentist appointment transition from a future event to a “now” also added a certain aliveness to my sense of time but I was relieved to let that aliveness die as it slipped into the past.   The most interesting observation from the exercise was an increased sense of flow and movement. It seemed more evident that time like space is so much about accommodating presentation and movement.
Robert
I love this post. Those ordinary tiny moments in a day doing such great big work as producing our sense of continuity in ordinary time.
Hi Robert. Your post provides a nice introduction to the second half of the DTS chapter we are reading. You give a taste of how the anticipation (of having to get up), getting up, then looking back at that experience–are all joined together in a flow of “accommodating presentation and movement”. I really appreciate how this week’s reading moves on from the special status of the future (in making the present alive) to a wider view in which the past is also a worthy member of the living wholeness of time.–Michael