Slaves to Freedom

As Satre notes that human beings are a creation that are both in and for themselves, the mysterious endeavor of creating an identity becomes all the more daunting. Trapped on a planet in a universe with no clear purpose or meaning, humanity must face the uncertain passage of time alone. Even as we live among each other, often in closer proximity than we'd prefer, humans still long for a sense of achievement or progress along the clean slate of free will. In efforts to justify or convince others of our opinions, we create associations among objects and people in an attempt to expand our personal webs of knowledge and understanding. We fear what we don't know and reject what appears contrary to the truth, but in reality, we are all subjects to the surprising nature of existence and must endure limits we may previously deem impossible. As a whole, humanity has experienced the most extreme instances of every conceivable emotion - from agony and despair to joy and euphoria - and these outliers of the collective human experience are what motivate us to live each day as if it's our last. As we are flung through the present into the infinite abyss of time, we craft our tales of existence and try to make sense of them in our universe of constantly changing possibility. Though our efforts may be ultimately futile, the history that has resulted from our brutal endurance of time thus far is the best and only one that we have.

Live for the moment... But what moment?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a class titled Business communications in which our introductory exercise was to stand in front of the class and give a short formal presentation which consisted of; your name, your major, where you are from, and two interesting things about yourself. I gave it my best shot but what struck me was that one of my pier’s interesting things was his philosophy on life. His take on life and time is as follows (plus some interpretation on my part):

Time is what separates reality from imagination. Anything that occurs in the past can’t be relived but can only be remembered. When we remember events we imagine them as we perceived them at the time they were happening and therefore we only remember specific details letting our imaginations fill in the gaps. Therefore the past exists only in our imaginations.

That which is going to occur has yet to do so and so once again we can only imagine what the future will hold. Therefore the future too is a non-existent product of our imagination.

Taking all of this into consideration the present is the only thing that is unquestionably real.

The basis of his philosophy is that one should always live for the moment that exists right now because it is the only thing that exists for certain. With that in mind I began to think about what it really means to live for the moment. If one does nothing in this present time then what of the time that approaches? It may be non-existent in its approach but when it arrives it is very real. If you lived for the previous moment then you may not be able to enjoy the present moment, so who’s to say that what has happened has no influence on what is happening, And if the past does in fact influence what happens in the present then it’s hard to believe that the past does not exist. The future on the other hand does not exist yet. When it becomes the present it will come into existence as a compilation of the consequences produced by the past unless there is a god who controls everything, in which case all time is final and cannot be altered which means that the future already exists, just not on this present plain of existence.