Pondering the Question of Now.

I had a phone call from the doctor’s receptionist today: ‘The doctor needs to talk to you about your latest urine sample. Can we arrange a time for him to give you a call?’

And so I begin to wonder what he needs to talk to me about. Doctors deal with health issues, don’t they, and so his need to talk to me is naturally a matter of concern. If it’s simply a matter of telling me that I have a persistent UTI and he’s prescribed a different antibiotic to be picked up, I don’t see the need of a conversation. The receptionist could have told me that, or he could have sent an email. It’s reasonable to assume, therefore, that there’s more to it.

Or is it reasonable? Here’s the problem:

I’ve often heard people say that we shouldn’t look ahead and imagine currently unknown scenarios. We should live entirely in the current moment and let the future unfold as it will. That’s a difficult one for me because, as I see it, every ‘now’ is both an ending and a beginning. ‘Now’ never stops moving, and I’m a congenitally impatient person. Consequently, my eyes have always been turned to the future and its possibilities, which I know is ultimately a futile exercise because the future is essentially unpredictable.

But I can’t help it and I doubt I will ever change. It seems to me to be a rational way of going through life, trapped as we are by the tyranny of temporal flow. I know it causes stress because it always has, but since ‘now’ is in a constant state of disappearing in our wake, I find it impossible to live in.