The Now Is the Only Time and Place Where You Can Choose |
The past is gone and cannot be changed.
The future is a descriptor for what does not exist.
Because of this, the only reality that exists is the now of the now.
The past—self‑evidently—is gone and cannot be changed. The future is a descriptor for what does not exist. The only time that exists is now, and it is in this existential time of now that decisions and choices are made. All choices result in consequences.
What about the future? The reality is that the future does not exist. The future is a construct, and from intellectual and emotional perspectives, there is a perpetual acceptance that it—the esoteric future—actually exists. However, the existential reality is that the future is not an external force; it is, as noted, a construct and intellectual projection.
The future could be thought of as a continual advancing process of each choice we make in this existential present, which can perhaps be referred to as the “now of the now.” Because of this existential reality, what this means (in universal terms) is that the choices we are constantly making (in the only reality that exists), which is the now of the now, what this means is that every decision, choice, and action—large or small—creates a consequence, which impacts what follows.
As such, and universally, each choice becomes a step, and those steps form the path of your ongoing life. What this—in categorical terms—means is: your future is not waiting for you; you are building it, moment by moment, through all of the innumerable choices and actions you take in this “now of the now,” which is the only reality that exists (Bandura, 2001; Hitlin & Elder, 2007; Kant, 1785/1996; Sartre, 1946/2007; Williams et al., 2021).
What this means, in the lived actuality and reality of our own existence, is that the present and agency are not abstract ideas but the constant condition of the absolute reality of now, and, as such, our life that is lived in this existential "now of the now."
This immutable proof of the actuality of the present and the existence of the self in this present (plus the associated immutable proof of the associated existence of the physical external world) became an intellectual and physically proven universal truth when René Descartes uttered those now immortal words (as translated into English): “I think, therefore I am.”
And it is in this existence (the recognition of the self and the external world, and the here and now of the now) that is the........