Wishes

It is an invitation to enjoy what one has and to live each day at our best, as we are not allowed to foresee future.

Such philosophy is based on the assumption that men cannot predict nor determine future.

Man can manage his own life and hence his own time.

As a matter of fact, in the previous verse Horace states: “Dum loquimur, fugeritinvidaaetas", "While we talk, the greedy time would have long gone”.

Every man can act only in and on the present, and is only by living that time that he must seize moments, chances and delights that show up today, without any restriction coming from hypothetical hopes or unsettling worries on the future.

This is a fundamental aspect, yet it is often left aside by most of the people.

If we had to ask about who we are and in what terms we would define ourselves, the description we would provide will be undoubtedly connected to our past and we would refer to a series of labels we or others came up with (or a mixture between the two).

Among these there will surely – and hopefully – be positive labels: “I am clever”; “I am polite” “I am good at studying; I am good at playing football”, and so forth.

However, other labels (and this proves true for the greater part of the population) will have a negative or limiting character: “I am ugly”, “I am not good at doing certain things”, and so forth.

I will deal with this at length in the chapter about restrictive certainties.

Here, I would like to emphasize the importance of the present , unique and eternal moment, a key concept for religions in the Far East.

Time as a flow of events is a great mystery for us, a sort of dimension we think we cannot separate from.

In pure astrophysical terms, time is inseparable from the movement of the stars and, according to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity – complementary to Galileo’s theory formulated in the 17th century – it constitutes the spacetime.

Thus, the movement of the stars creates time: we, as parts of the system, are bound by it without any chance to escape the mechanism.

Despite the fact that our life is made of a series of moments that, if put together, form the timeline we lived and will live, we actually live in some sort of “eternal present”: every moment of our life belongs to the past from the very moment we experience it, and it can be lived once again only through our conscience.

The same applies for the future, a series of logical and possible outcomes that exist only on a mental level.

We do are bound by time and there is no way we can avoid this.

Yet it is also true that we actually live in the present, the only existent and relevant dimension for us.

Once that moment is gone, as we said before, it belongs to the past and it ceases to exist on a physical level.

It continues its existence as an effect of what we did or thought.

Future, instead, exists only as a dimension in the realm of our thoughts and it exists only because we project our hopes or our concerns in it.

Hence, what we are is indeed the result of our past.

Yet, if we actually ARE the product of our past, this has ceased to exist and could possibily do so even within ourselves if we stop any connection with it and if we stop using it as a yardstick.

Future is determined by our actions and decisions in the present.

Despite its bond with uncertainty – what someone refers to as coincidence, whereas others call it “destiny” – it still remains a product of our actions in the present.

Hence, if I decide to write a book someday in the future but I do not open my computer or use my typewriter (or pen and paper for those who prefer handwriting), this future will never become a reality.

The opposite is true as well.

If everything leads us to believe that our future is to be taken for granted based on what we usually do (e.g. going to work every morning), that does not mean that we will automatically be at work tomorrow.

We may get sick, we might have a car crash or meet our life partner.

We could steer towards the airport instead of going to work and we might as well become a millionaire because we bought the right lottery ticket, and so forth.

Hence the fundamental importance of the present moment, which is always counterbalanced by our mind and its tendency to focus on the past or on the future.

It does so precisely due to the aforementioned process of identification of our Ego with our past actions.

Life is thus a sequence of eternal and present moments, yet our mind constantly escapes this vision: our Ego – that is, our personality as a result of our past – needs to conceive time as a continuum in order to self-determine and exist.

This is also our prison though.

Hidden in the past are events that hurt us and that continue to affect our present, as we will see later on.

In this chapter we deal with the present moment and with the utmost importance of being in the right place at the right time in order to fulfill our desires, or to do the right thing following our gut: living the present instead of running away from it.

More accurately, how many acted by instinct – that is, without thinking about it – later to realize that it was the best thing to be done in that particular moment?

How many regret instead all the delayed or missed chances to take action due to doubt?

German antropologist Ruth-Inge Heinze (1919 - 2007) tells about a World War II episode in Germany.

After an air raid, she could not find shelter and she was hiding in the entrance recess at the front door of a building in order to escape bullet scraps and bombs.

“I suddenly felt the drive to go out in the street and run towards the building at some 300 feet from where I was.

I was not hit by any of the shrapnel (hollow artillery munitions containing bullets) flying around me and I believe it’s been a miracle.

In the moment I reached the second building, the house I was taking shelter in before was hit and completely destroyed by a bomb"

What would’ve happened if Doctor Heinze chose to stop and think about the danger of running out in the street instead of acting instinctively?

These events are generally defined as “ premonitions”, or to quote Dr. Julia Mossbridge, “ Unexplained Anticipatory Activity”.

Taken from Stendhal’s “ The Charterhouse of Parma”: “Suddenly, at an immense height in the sky and on my right-hand side, I saw an eagle, the bird of Napoleon; he flew majestically past making for Switzerland, and consequently for Paris.

'And I too,' I said to myself at that moment, 'will fly across Switzerland with the speed of an eagle, and will go to offer that great man a very little thing, but the only thing, after all, that I have to offer him, the support of my feeble arm. He wished to give us a country, and he loved my uncle.'

At that instant, while I was gazing at the eagle, in some strange way my tears ceased to flow; and the proof that this idea came from above is that at the same moment, without any discussion, I made up my mind to go, and saw how the journey might be made”

What happens then when we long for something?

Do we have the ability and the strength required to make it come true?