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Until today, I lived in the past and the future. Just a while ago, I realized the present. Our upbringing by school, family, society was always based on the significance of the future. The careers of the upcoming generations, our children, the planet.
Our actions are guided by the prophetic validation that a successful future will provide them.
Our pleasures are gained or lost, if not in intensity, certainly in significance, depending on the anticipated consequences they will cause in the near or distant future. The choices in our life take into account the outcomes they will someday provoke. But the future often relies on the past to be justified. It too participates in our assessments, choices, and pleasures, although they never fail to emphasize that even this, detached from the designs of the future, turns into morbid sentimentality.
We suddenly find ourselves in the midst of life, referring to a given and certain past loaded with shadows, trying from something that ended to draw, not as one would expect, emotion from memories and reminiscence of moments (because then we would be accused of useless nostalgia), but rather lessons for the future. For a future whose existence and content always remain uncertain despite our persistent efforts to consider it certain and filled with hope.
The logical inability to grasp the concept of the present time leads to the absurd result of erasing it and in its place, putting a continuous alternation of past and future.
We thus transformed into beings in limbo without a daily dimension. Our pleasures became mental acrobatics that draw from the past and aim at the future.
When the time comes for the past to balance the future, at least in a numerical relationship, when the beginning fades and the end becomes faint, then everything begins to appear present. Time elongates and stops. The past meets the future. Memories become daily life. And the goals instantaneous conquests. Then we are ready to live in the present. To connect the world of senses with the world of reminiscence and hope. To discard the neurosis that the contempt of the moment generates. To extend the present to the limits of our life. A society of dreams, consisting of people who live in the present from birth to death, will be less ambitious, not neurotic, and possibly more just. Its members will create for the joy of creation and not for the outcome. The process of life will gain greater significance for them than the beginning and the end, within the otherwise unknown dimension of time. Thus, they will face the unknown not as a threat. Reconciled with the present, they will reconcile with time.
Plato Rivellis