It's good to live in the now

This week's Independent News & Media Irish regional newspapers' column.

I was chatting with a man on Sunday who often throws me nuggets of wisdom. I consider him a wise person.

Some days earlier he heard someone say that the time to be happy is now. It had left a mark on him.

Maybe it has something to do with the aging process, I’m not sure, it might be because of a number of circumstances and situations but these days it is dawning on me in the strongest of terms the importance of appreciating the now. Think about it, it is all we have. The past is gone and the future is not yet. 

Living in the past can so easily tie us down to ways of acting and thinking that make no sense at all. 

There is a phenomenon happening around the world at present that is telling us to circle the wagons and return to older known ways of doing things. 

The resurgence of a nasty type of nationalism, which shouts at us to make our country great again, it places strong emphasis on the old idea of a nation state. But are we not moving away from such understandings of statehood?

Is Brexit not linked to a nostalgia for the past, a time when Britain was at the head of an empire and not an equal among members?

The same sort of retrenchment is happening within religions, people hankering for old ways that no longer fit the world of today. Indeed, religions and many of their ministers seem to be at the vanguard of such regressive thinking and behaviour.

When it comes to living in the future, just think of all the wild promises that have been made and then see how they have been fulfilled. The advent of the computer promised us a paperless society. We are using more paper today than at any other time in history. I’m old enough to remember when plastic packaging first appeared in our grocery shops.

Approximately eight million tonnes of plastic enters the world’s oceans every year. Plastic has gone from a great invention to a scourge in many instances.

It might be that I am growing lazy but I keep thinking that airports are the perfect metaphor for our insatiable desire to move out of the now and get to the next place. Of course travel widens our horizons, it’s good to see new places, experience different cultures but when I see people walking around cities aided by a Google map, pushing an awkward case I’m wondering what all this tourism is about. 

And then all the photographs that are taken. Sometimes it seems the pics are more valued than the real thing. Maybe it is that I’ve been there, done that and am now bored with it all. No, I think there is more to it than that. 

The same day that the man mentioned to me about living in the now a neighbour asked me if I had a piece of cheese. She wanted to feed the two robins in her back garden. They are regular visitors. The extraordinary joy those two robins gave us as we watched them being cheeky, coming into the kitchen.

Isn’t it the same with so many aspects to our lives. With all our rushing hither and tither we are missing the extraordinary reality that’s right in front of our noses.

A nugget from Albert Einstein: ‘Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none’.