If the past has already happened; if it is an event or thing that is at least as far away from “now” as the split second we need to begin to describe it…
And if the future is a realm of possibilities that might manifest someday, but that exists now only as fretting and testing and planning, and if the future too is also something that is far enough from us that we can put words and consideration to it…
If both of these are defined by our ability to articulate them…
Then what is the present?
And what is memory?
Memory is the way we choose to describe the past, from the moment we are in now when we make that choice. A moment which is, of course, “future” to that past we are describing on the timeline we all believe in.
Memory is our only tool to understand and keep the past, whether it is our own memory, or another person’s, or a compilation of memories set down as history in a book.
But if we continue to move into the future, away from the past, and if our lives contain an always new and different constellation of events and perspectives as a result, then the past is always new because the future is always coming.
As this happens, memory changes.
And the past changes too.
2 comments:
Very profound and so true.
I can't decide what is more compelling to me at the moment: that the past can be changed by the future, or that the present, which we all think we are living in, is such a brief moment of stillness that the minute we turn our minds to view it, it is already gone.
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