imagination – What’s here now?

I’ve always found this time of year rather strange. I find myself surrounded by people both off and online looking back over the previous year and/ or looking ahead to the next.

I find myself doing neither. What’s done is done. Lessons will be learned or they won’t and what’s to come will come and the degree to which we have any conscious agency over any of it is (as I always boringly say) greatly overstated.

The only time that matters is now, the present moment – forever on the cusp of what’s gone and what’s unfolding. Neither memory nor imagination. An ever fluid liminal zone, ungraspable yet vitally and vividly apparent. Reality in the raw.

Nothings comes next, this is always it.

I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

— Mark Twain

Judging others from a distance is easy, lazy and more often than not, diminishes the self, all the while hiding behind a wall of self righteousness.

Understanding others does not mean agreeing with them. It is an underused facet of our imaginative powers to inhabit the worlds of other people. To walk their streets and share their spaces is to do a service to ourselves and others.

The more we all experience about each other the more we all learn, grow and become less defensive and ultimately able to disagree with each other in a way that doesn’t tear each other apart.