Leaving no Foot-prints behind

Living in the past, present and future at once

The time zones of our life by Mukul Sharma (article in Economic Times)

Aphorisms telling us to live “one day at a time” turn out to be less cutesy if we think of a day as an extended metaphor for the present. Then it begins to make a little more sense. Recovering drug abusers and alcoholics, for instance, are exhorted by their various anonymous organisations to do the same: just try to stay off the stuff for the coming 24 hours and not think of how they might be able to hold out during the next day, the week after or even luck out for a lifetime later without breaking into a cold turkey of anticipation immediately. The reason is, for most of us the future comes so heavily pre-loaded with the past and memories of experience that it skews the path ahead unfairly at times. As a result we hardly remain in the kind of control we would ideally like to be. In the 1964 classic Games People Play, the psychiatrist Eric Berne described the dysfunctional nature of such set patterns by calling them predetermined “scripts”. He catalogued a series of mind games in which people play through an outlined and predictable sequence of “transactions” that are superficially plausible but which actually conceal motivations, include private significance to the parties involved and lead to a well-defined outcome that are usually counterproductive. Of course we can’t avoid history, much less disregard it, and those who don’t learn from its mistakes are indeed doomed to repeat them with unnecessarily distressing consequences. One day at a time also doesn’t mean repeating the same day forever because that would make it like instant history happening all the time in the present. Neither does it mean an unconcern about opportunity and potential since that would lock us eternally in the here and now. What living one day at a time actually means is being able to learn from the future before it takes place. Learning from the future is the art of trial and error without, in fact, trying or (hopefully) turning out to be erroneous. In a sense it’s a process of virtual extrapolation which makes the day more dynamic, meaningful and, ultimately, rewarding — during the course of the day itself. People who manage to do this also manage to shorten its duration from an arbitrary 24 hours down to the extremely thin slice of “now” moving across the continuum of all time available to them. They live, as some of our wisest folk have done, in the past, present and future at once. – Mukul Sharma

See also Swami Chidananda's discourse "Leaving no foot-prints behind" (click here)