The Funny Tricks of Time

There are days when living in the world becomes difficult -- customary things slip through my mind and little tasks become a burden. My head seems completely out of it instead of it's usual capable self. Today was one of those. I continually forgot little details that made me have to do things over and slowed down my work immensely. I seemed to be floating in the present, so focused on the immediate that I had no perspective. Living in the moment can be enjoyable and freeing, but if taken to an extreme it removes us from the world, limits our interaction and our ability to function in the way that is expected of us. How much do we need to be in this world? How much should we bend to it's expectations?

Time is horizontal and our identities stretch through it. Both the past and the future affect the person we are and the way we are living in the present. Living with a conscious knowledge of them seems natural and approapriate to mankind. We cannot excape time. It is a necessary factor in human experience, human perception, human life. But we are not slaves to it. We must seek a balance - a way to live in which we function in time but are not controlled by it.

Thinking about the role time places in one's identity helps reveal how intrinsic it is to human nature. Monsignor Sokolowski, a Philosophy Professor specializing in Phenomenology said in a lecture he gave:

If I'm daydreaming about something I did yesterday, I am now doubled into the one who was doing what I did yesterday. My identity is not found primarily in my present self. It's found in between myself now and myself then. We have this duality within our own selves. We carry around our past and our future. We live not only in our immediate surroundings, but in the absence of the future and the past, and we see ourselves in that future and past. Indeed, sometimes the memory is so powerful and intrusive that it won't remain past. It becomes present constantly, and that's known as a kind of psychological difficulty. Overcoming that problem essentially involves distinguishing between one's present self and one's past self. And one's identity is the identity that occurs between those two.

Following another level of personal identity, we can sympathize with another person and yet know that the other person is always irreducible to us. Wouldn't it be scary to have someone else's memory come up inside of you? Isn't it odd how when we see somebody we haven't seen for 10 or 15 years that we think of them as somehow alien because we realize they have so many memories that we never shared with them?

The rest of the article is quite interesting and he provides a brief yet clear introduction to phenomenology. It can be found at http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/newsletter/1999/spring/sokolowski.htm