At times, I wished I lived in other times, earlier times. To relive a beautiful moment, to revisit an earlier period in a civilization I’ve come to revere. Other times, I wished I lived in later times, leapfrogging all the disease and disorder and war.

We believe we learn from the past, and that without it, we couldn’t learn. Our intelligence, based in part on memory, wouldn’t be possible without time.

To borrow hope from the future, to bide us through a difficult time we slog through now. To escape into an idyllic past remembered as better than it really was. And so it seems that we spend most of our moments out of the moment, most of our time in time, and out of now.

Think about it: most of your moments are lost in thought, and most thought hearkens back to a past or projects ahead to a future. Seldom are we in now, even though the now is all that surrounded us. It’s like being a fish awash in an infinite ocean, yet in constance imagining ourselves to walk on dry land. If you fantasize about the desert long enough, soon you’ll be convinced that that’s where you really stand, even though you swim in waters deep and cold.

Yale, a cowboy steeped in mysticism, believed that we waste most of our lives avoiding the present moment. He believed that we see what we believe, while we hypnotize ourselves into believing that we believe what we see. Mostly, we see the present through the lens of the past, which means that, until we can let it go, we see no present at all.

The problem with future/past is that it isn’t real. If you think about it, unless you’re clairvoyant, your predictions about the future usually turn out to be wrong. They’re fantasies, and the fantasy called the future seldom turns out as good or as bad as our minds make it out to be.

Our memories of the past aren’t accurate. We recreate a memory each time it’s recalled. Eventually, our recollections become distortions. No two of us ever remembers an event in the same way.

The past isn’t happening anymore, so it’s no longer real. The future isn’t happening yet, so it’s not real yet. These two time zones, past and future, are unreal states. Yale, the main character in my novel, The Dirt: Journeys of a Mystic Cowboy, saw time that way. I think that’s why he spent so much time out of time, out on escarpments, pondering a sunset, up on mountaintops, watching the dawn.

You may reply that reveling in a pleasant memory helps us cope with an unpleasant now, that without hope for the future, we wouldn’t be able to stand the present. Yet really, when you think about it, most of your suffering happens then, not now. Your suffering comes not only from clinging to a past that, if you’re remembering it incorrectly, never was and definitely isn’t now, but from the resentments, the anger that’s derived from living in that nonexistent past. Most anger is old anger, and old is always of the past. That’s why no one ever wants to grow it; old, I mean. Most of our pain is memory of pain. We had pain once, so we can recall instantly it’s delectable agony. We may even cling to it, Yale would say, because we think it tells us who we are.

Most of our fear comes from a regard of the future, a future that never comes. What if is a terrible way to begin a sentence, unless you write science fiction. The pain that comes from fear is almost always posited on a fantasy of the future. And fear is one half of the fundamental difficulty that afflicts us here, Yale said.

Yale believed that our suffering is based on time, on our belief in time, on our investment in being in time.

We’re trapped in time, believe we live in time, and that we can’t escape from time. We cling to our memories, depend on them to ‘learn’ about the dangers most certainly lurking in the future. Yet what we struggle to be free of are memories. We try to screw and spend and drink and drug our way out of our traumatic memories, trying to blot them out of our conscious and conscience selves.

Our problems won’t be solved in time. They’ll only be resolved once we learn to live outside of time, realizing that they come from time. To live now, as children do, as Yale did. Yet no one believed him. No one heard him.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within