LIVE LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW

Alone on Preikestolen

Whenever someone advises me to, “live like there’s no tomorrow,” they might as well say, “Walk like you were born unable to fly.” Both are true, neither are choices; there IS no tomorrow and I CAN'T fly

Though we may speak of making big plans for future events, and as often as the idea may occur to us in different states of change during its development, the event itself is merely another such state happening in the same here and now from which the plan arose and within which memories will recall its having occurred. Experience can be had only here now. Time is an invention by which we speak of things not now, mañana, but we can only speak of and experience thinking about the concept in the eternal here and now.

We all live within a culture that practices the creation of artifacts representing our perceptions and conceptions of reality, and promptly forgets such symbols aren’t what they represent; worshipping golden idols. The only reality to such creations are the experiences of conception and manifestation on the part of the maker and of perception and belief by witnesses. It is fairly simple to perceive that a painting of a flower is not the flower in the vase sitting next to it, while it is literally impossible for believers to distinguish between religious dogma and wishful thinking — especially tenacious where scriptures are full of contradictions to one’s actual experience of the natural environment and prohibitions of one’s own natural behavior. It is as if culture pushes the idea that the more one must deny reality to live in accordance with the conceived artifacts, the purer the merit for reward in a fantasy afterlife. “If you want to get ahead, you gotta stick it out. My country, right or wrong.”

I fly with ease in my dreams. It is so enjoyable that I am a bit fearful of heights without a handhold when I’m awake. The concept of my flying is so temptingly real I can envision feeling that special organic intuition that signals my ability to levitate in my dreams, walking off into space to finally break through my own shreds of disbelief and fly away. I know the difference between reality and dream fantasy, I fell thirty feet from a trapeze when I was thirteen — straight down, no gliding. I am just as acutely aware of the difference between experiencing reality directly and experiencing the mere second hand information, at best, to be found in symbols created by other’s perceptions.

I have always walked like I couldn’t fly. I’m in the process of learning the benefits of living like there’s no tomorrow, in the here and now, and discovering the debilitation of living like there is some other when or where experience can be had by sacrificing awareness of being here now.

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Tangential to the forgoing essay is the matter of gaining enough life experience of the conflicts between one’s direct experience of nature and civilization’s antagonistic exploitation of it to begin questioning the authority under whose aegis one’s own nature is trained to obey and whose favor one’s reputation is designed to curry. Without such doubt in external authority’s righteousness in defining proprietary behavior, one must abandon any reliance on the intrinsic value of oneself to consider one’s own existence valid. Such people can never be alone because they cease to exist.

A real horror story would be to be unable to love myself unless I felt loved by another; as scary as meeting city folk who have never walked on the grass or were unaware Big Macs come from cows. Civilization breeds such zombies more or less successfully.