Moment - Quotes
Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother`s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I`ve written, what I`ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word "memory" into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it`s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
How we behave is a balancing act between our future and present selves. In the future, we want to be fit, but in the present, we want the candy bar. In the future, we want to be a well-rounded, wellinformed intellectual virtuoso, but right now we want to watch Jersey Shore. Behavioral economists call this present bias - the gap between your preferences for your future self and your preferences in the current moment.
You are young, and then you are middle-aged, but it is hard to tell the moment of passage from one state to the next.
When you`re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you`ve just wandered a few feet off the path, that you`ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and its time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you dont even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
I wanted to be free, free to do and to give only as my whims dictated. [...] The moment anything was expected or demanded of me I balked. That was the form my independence took.
Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understands reality?
You can`t just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can`t plan the moment you lose your way in the first place.
To know who you are without any delusions or sympathy is a moment of revelation that no one experiences unscathed.
Magic is not about having a puzzle to solve. It`s about creating a moment of awe and astonishment. And that can be a beautiful thing.
You should never fast-forward into the future. Because every time you do, you rob yourself of the journey, the present moment, which, in the end, is all there really is.