A Quote by Richard Chenevix Trench
We live not in our moments or our years:
The present we fling from us like the rind
Of some sweet future, which we after find
Bitter to taste.
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I’ve found that God often lets us taste how sweet he is in our most bitter moments.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us.
Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is not some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.
We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present.
We cannot live in the past; it is gone. Nor can we live in the future; it is forever beyond our grasp. We can live only in the present. If we are unaware of our present actions, we are condemned to repeating the mistakes of the past and can never succeed in attaining our dreams for the future.
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
Our thoughts are always pulling us into the future or the past, away from the present. But it is in the present moment that we find Spirit, our essential being and the force that animates all life.
Our past affects us, our present affects us, and even our future can affect us. We live in the relative world of time and space.
The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.
Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future.
Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
We can’t heal what we don’t feel. We can’t have a future until we fully inhabit our present. It’s like the proverbial Groundhog Day. Most people don’t live 70-90 years; they live the same year 70-90 times because they keep regurgitating an incomplete present.
Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.
Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.
Swift flies our time on pinions fleet, Like vapours on the breeze; The transient bliss we now call sweet, The passing moments seize. The gilded joy, the present hour, Soon wing themselves away; Departing like the fading flower That pleas'd us Yesterday.
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