WHAT NOW?

I read an old interview with playwriter/screenwriter/filmmaker David Mamet recently, which got me thinking about the kind of stuff I like to think about, which is the future, the past, fate, destiny -- you know, all of those esoteric concepts that are always overlooked in school, in favor of such important, crucial ideas like imaginary numbers and the International Date Line. (I still don't get 'imaginary numbers'. And try explaining what the International Date Line is to a group of slightly confused Cambodian university students. I've been there. It wasn't pretty.)

Mamet was making kind of an offhand remark, which is where all the great wisdom is inevitably found. He was saying that there really is no 'future' -- that the very concept of the 'future' is simply a means by which those in power maintain power. "Do what we say, and do it now, or else W, X and Y will take place. Oh, and maybe even Z, if you're not careful."

Makes sense to me, especially in light of multiple 'terror warnings' and threats of attack on American soil. We sacrifice our daily lives for what might be, could be, probably won't be.

I like to think of it like this: The future is now, just extended, like a twirly straw, and we never, ever get there, because it is always now, this moment, and not then, or the next moment. It's forever now.

Which puts even the very concept of the 'future' in a tricky place. Where will I be in that mythical, non-existent point in time? Will I still be in Cambodia five years hence? Unlikely, very unlikely, but not impossible. And when (or if) that five year span comes to a head, will I then proclaim: "Aha! I'm now in the future!" No. I'll simply be here, at this moment, doing this thing. Plain and simple. The year 2000 didn't feel like the year 2000 because it wasn't the year 2000, not the one we'd grown up with, that futuristic realm of flying cars and skyway escalators. It was simply now.

And now it's then, and the year 2000 actually seems rather quaint, pre 9/11 and all.

So then: where do we position ourselves, if there's never a next, and only a now? We have to plan for the future, but since it never comes, how do we know if our plans have been fulfilled? One day you wake up and say "Damn, I'm almost thirty," and of course you don't feel thirty, because it was always up-ahead and down-the-line. The plans you made were for that thirty-year old self transplanted from whatever your twelve or fifteen or twenty-one year old self was thinking and feeling and hoping for.

All I know is, the future doesn't exist, but I'd still like to go there, just to chill out, hang out, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. When I was younger the future was, indeed, the undiscovered country, this strange and foreign land, waiting to be discovered, if not conquered, but now I see it more as a way-stop, the fast-food place at the side of the highway that you take a break at before getting back on the road again. It's not a place you dwell in. You prepare for it, and you have 'future preference', as Bill Clinton's old prof used to say, but it's merely the repository for this present moment. Everything we're doing is preparing ourselves for the next now. And the next. And the next.

So you better make sure that your now has some weight, purpose and dignity to it, because it's a linked chain, this collection of present moments is, like the Buddhist concept of a reincarnated soul: one candle lights the next, then the next, then the next, so that there is no clear differentiation between the various lives; they are all part of the same, fluid line. Moment leads to moment to moment, each of them building and shaping the next, influencing the next. Each lending gravity or grace to what follows.

So, take care now, is what I'm saying.

It's all you've got.