A Perpetual Now

In the past I had created a website for all my writing and poetry. It has long been taken down since I stopped paying the yearly fee for the domain name. I called the website PerpetualNow.com. I came up with the idea of a perpetual now in the midst of a depression revolving around the annoyance of time.

Time has always plagued me with its constant progression. We are always at odds with time. It’s a continuous struggle that strains you forever. When you are enjoying yourself, when you are happy, when everything seems almost perfect, that is when time flies by. You try to hold onto the moment. You want to stay there forever in peaceful bliss. However, cruel time rips it away from you sooner than you’d like.

In the worst moments, when you are stressing, when you are in pain, when you just want to escape, that is when time lasts extremely long. The moments you dread last a life time. The hours and hours at a job you hate drain you and tear you down. We all have had these feelings towards time and I used to think that these were inescapable.

I eventually realized that the problem was not with time itself but with how one perceives time. We are taught (actually it could be innate as well) to view time in a very specific way. We are taught to look at our past in order to learn from our previous actions and experiences. These tools of learning are then used by us to look forward and create a desirable future for ourselves. This is how we are taught to live our lives – with constant reflection of the past and promise for the future.

There is one major issue with this type of thinking – the past is the past and there’s nothing one can do to change it, and the future will always be the future and one will never reach it. Living purely in a time that you will never exist in seems nonsensical to me. Hence, the present is the time that should matter.

The idea of perpetual now suggests living in the present every moment you can in every aspect of your life. Now is the time that matters because now is happening right now. Focusing only on the past or future results in one missing the most important time there is – the time you actually exist in – the now. The concept seems simple enough but in practice it can be quite difficult.

Now I’m not suggesting that you completely ignore all past experiences and you never consider any future repercussions – obviously living that way would be practically impossible. All I’m saying is that we should not be constantly concerned with such things especially in our average daily thinking. To exist in the moment is to take in everything around you. The stupid cliché is to ‘stop and smell the roses’. 

However, I’m suggesting more than just stopping occasionally. I think that every moment outside of our future plans and our past reflections should exist in the present – in the now. If you think about that for a second you’d realize that that equates to a very large amount of time. In my opinion, this large amount of time is being wasted by everyone. So therefore, it is not time’s fault for our issues, but our own for not focusing our thoughts on what is most important.

A perpetual now is a way of thinking about everything in one’s life, everything all around you, all the people in your life, all the senses, the beauty, the terrors – combine everything into one perfect moment of existence. It is the only moment that really matters since you will always be in the now no matter how hard you’ve been trained to ignore it.