BackMake every moment of your life count
Every once a while, it makes sense to let go of the past and the future and live in the present because now is all that we own
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I just got back half an hour ago after snorkelling off the coast of Bintan in Indonesia. My cousin Niffy, much like my brother Kolya, often pushes me to get outside my comfort zone to try things I haven’t tried before, or fear. Often times, we argue. Sometimes, they get their way. At others, I do. This time, I conceded ground to Niffy without so much as a murmur.
And so, a 30-minute speed-boat ride into the ocean later, snorkelling gear on and ready and some instructions by the lifeguard in broken English that sounded like gibberish I didn’t pay attention to, I finally took the plunge with her, all kinds of safety gear harnessed.
But once in the water, terror enveloped me. I didn’t know how to breathe in there. This was the second time it was happening. The first was when I tried diving off the coast of San Diego, urged by my brother. It almost ended in disaster after the safety cord got tangled in my legs and I had to be pulled up.
This time, again, I thought I’d choke. All I wanted was to throw the gear off my face and gasp for air.
That said, my mind was conflicted as well. On the one hand, I wanted to see and experience a world I would otherwise not see. On the other hand, I wanted to get back to my so-called comfort zone.
Don’t ask me where the moment of epiphany came from. Some voice in my head asked my fear to shut up, absorb the instructor’s words and stop thinking. And when I did, I could breathe. I could paddle. The fear passed. What followed was my being witness to a beautiful world and divorced from familiarity. Corals, swarms of fish and beauty that I didn’t want to let go of.
I was living in the moment. I wasn’t thinking. I just knew I existed. It was—for lack of a better metaphor—a zen-like state. This time around, the instructor had to goad me to get out of the water long after Niffy and her kids had.
Something similar happened last night when Niffy pushed me on a little boat into the pitch dark. It rode quietly past the mangroves where fireflies dance. My first instinct was to do the touristy thing of pulling the camera out to capture those moments for posterity. But in doing that, I was trying to frame the perfect picture that I may preserve for posterity. I was thinking and asking questions of myself. How do I frame the images right? What angle can I get that the images be perfect?
Until, in another epiphany, a part of me said that if I didn’t soak the breeze in, listen to the silence of the night, look up at the clear sky and Orion gazing down fondly upon me, while the fireflies engage in their mating rituals, the moment would be gone forever.
It takes fireflies eight months to incubate and come to life. But their lives are snuffed out in just three weeks. That’s all there is to them. So, what is it with my camera and me? Why am I unable to soak in the moment? Do I really need to think all of the time? Can’t I just be?
The question was first asked of me a few days ago by Australian philosopher and writer Damon Young. He challenged me to a sprint in the pages of his book How to Think About Exercise, on the steepest slope I could find.
Now, I am an intermittent runner who is still to complete a full marathon. The best I have managed is a half. However, sprints are not my cup of tea. But Damon argued forcefully and made a few promises.
The first that I would experience a state called “transient hypofrontality". Very simply put, it means my sense of time will dilate and slow down because parts of my brain in the prefrontal cortex will shut down. This is important for two reasons.
1.. The prefrontal cortex is that part of the brain that houses higher cognitive functions like my sense of will, morality and sense of self.
2. Above all else, this part of the brain is what allows me to calculate and assess time. When it shuts down though, my ability to assess the past, present and the future goes through the window as well. I can exist in a state that researchers call the “deep now".
This is a state schizophrenics and drug addicts experience. It lies someplace between dreaming, mindfulness and a psychedelic trip. In these altered states, the brain’s creativity enhances itself and the inner critic shuts up. When you emerge, the outcome is a boost in confidence and creativity. I hadn’t heard of this one before.
So, in spite of having a little too much on my plate to think about and handle, I thought I might as well take Damon’s challenge up. It started with a gentle jog to loosen myself up. I stared at the steepest slope I know of near my home in Mumbai. I can’t be too sure entirely, but I guess it slopes upwards at 40 degrees on the outside.
I started out at the bottom of the slope, hands pumping furiously, wrists clenched tight and legs kicking furiously. Suddenly, the water bottle I always carry seemed heavy. The left hand too weak to hold it. And the phone... why did I need a damn phone... it seemed like a brick. My shoulder blades were tight. I could feel the pain in my calves mount up with each stride. The horizon was closing in. I’d lost track of time. Everything was a blur.
The only thing I was aware of was my body. Nothing else mattered. The end was in sight. I don’t think my frame had run as fast as it did that day since the time I was a kid. Roughly 65m into the hardest sprint I have ever run, my body gave up. I’d have gotten past the line if I had slowed down. But the challenge was to sprint without slowing down. If I were to go by the clock, I guess those moments may have lasted 10 seconds on the outside. But it seemed like an eternity.
I stopped, gulped some water, took in a few deep breaths, walked up the remaining distance, looked back at where I started out from, wondered why I couldn’t run a few metres more and started a slow trek down.
My mind was shut out to everything—except me. My mortality was staring me in the face. What had I done to myself? The perfect, the chiselled me that used to exist had evaporated. The me that could bowl the perfect length, whether it was necessary or not, but to intimidate a batsman with a long run-up to the crease before hurling a delivery for over after over now seemed like a creature of the past. The 40s were showing.
As I got to the start line again, this time around, my tired body loosened up a bit. I let my hands go. My fists weren’t pumping like crazy on the one hand or flaying on the other. It was controlled, but not overtly. My legs were kicking hard. My breathing was deep. But my run was slower. Not for lack of trying. I was giving it all I got. I managed 20m more. Don’t ask me how. Perhaps without my knowing it, I attempted longer strides. I didn’t get to the finish line.
But for some reason, this time around, a sense of exhilaration took over. Almost like I had accomplished something. I wasn’t competing against anybody. There was nobody to watch me and applaud. Just a few lazy dogs staring at me. I walked back, tried a third rep, slower again, kept track of nothing, stopped when I couldn’t go on, smiled and started a 3km walk back home. I was in a reverie.
And this was the second promise Damon made on the pages of the book. That when I practise something as demanding as a sprint, I get to live my life in the here and now. A condensed reality, but very unlike all kinds of reality we otherwise experience. And in this reality, there is no ambiguity about anything.
This is very unlike the complicated lives we live, in which we are compelled to make choices all of the time. As software programmers put it in their language, there are “if" and “then" situations in the worlds they create.
But the thing about all of the experiences I have attempted to describe above is that it divorces you from all of the harsh realities we face every day. Either you experience it or you don’t. There are no “ifs", “buts" and “thens". If you manage to do it, you know what you did right and figure out how to do better the next time around. If you don’t, you go back and try again. In any which case, you get better. And that is a virtue that makes you stronger.
But to do that right, you got to do is live in the moment. And there seems to be only one life to live in the moment and see the moment for what it is.
Brings to mind what Aristotle wrote: “Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come—for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess?"
“...when the longest- and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his."
Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel Publishing.
His Twitter handle is @c_assisi
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com
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