So how is it that sometimes you can just do things without thinking about what
you’re doing, you’re present, in the moment, acting without analyzing how
you’re acting? This is no doubt the wonder and beauty of childhood. Kids just
do stuff. I recall when as young dads my friend and I would watch our kids play,
play unselfconsciously, building forts and hiding and imagining scenes, the
picture of being animated and engaged with their reality though even then they were
making stuff up to make it more fun. We concluded that “kids are like they’re
always stoned.” And while they weren’t stoned, perhaps that was a premonition
of what we as adults crave, crave to be in some kind of positive zone,
engaged in the present a hundred percent, in “flow” as we sometimes call it in
education.
Nowadays I do very little without simultaneously observing and analyzing what
it is that I am doing. Even as I sit here and write I am aware of this self-
observance. Perhaps I just need to relax, enjoy the moment, see these words
flow as if I’m a child fully engaged. That is the beauty of art and writing. As I sit
here at the Millennium Library, I see across from me a fellow sketching. He
appears fully focused, relatively at ease in what he’s creating, or is he? Art is
multi-edged, fulfilling and then exasperating all at once, a simultaneously
private and public endeavour. Private in the sense that it’s the artist who does
the producing based on his or her experience and skill. Public in the sense
that others might see what has been created, wonder about or question what
the artist has rendered. Something created is a rendering from an actual life, a
person, someone more or less present in the moment, a glimpse into who that
someone has been, is and will be. Sharing one’s writing or displaying one’s art
becomes a display of oneself, risky at some level and very engaging. Is this
not a good way to be present, the act of rendering self for others?
The beauty of a good book or a good movie or a beautiful work of art could be
seen as an escape from the present. Or is it? Is escape actually just a
preferred form of being present. Odd juxtaposition. People get drunk or stoned
ostensibly to escape the present. Or are these ways of being more present,
comfortable in the present?
And so the question emerges, what is the present after all? We say the here
and now, the moment, what is…reality. Any given moment, upon reflection,
just is, then was, now becomes a memory.
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