The Moving Now

“Now” is made up of milliseconds and beyond. Now, or “this” moment isn’t a fixed time. Time doesn’t stand still. What’s more interesting is the way now feels. It’s always the same quality, and always happening.

If we stare at a second-hand moving as we say “now,” we can realize the movement aspect of now. How this moment is a misnomer. And then imagine if we could see the microunits of a second on a clock and how much faster it would seem time was moving. I think we relate the word now to the slow pace of which we design clocks, that space in between two seconds, or the emptiness on a digital clock, the lack of activity between the numbers, which makes us feel like time stands still in the now.

Now makes us think of “a moment in time.” But the quality we try to capture with this word would be better represented by talking about our sensory experience, seeing our body in the space it is occupying, sensing our surroundings through our sense organs, acknowledging our pure physicality and the material nature of our environment. The things we touch, see, listen to, taste and smell are all chemically composed, including the air around us. This is what we really mean when we use that word because that is the experience transmitted: our ability to sense our physical presence in time (which is always there whether we are paying attention to it or not), existing with everything else.

Earth carries us on its circuits like a moving vehicle. The time slots we tune into when our attention is on the “now” stream with all the before and after rotations and revolutions. Now is always about this continual movement, the streaming shifts of Earth’s circles around itself and the sun. We are never standing still; there is always movement. Our whole life is one continuous moment.