No time like the present — is that so?

How do we define the word, the concept, ‘now’, or ‘the present’? Are they the same thing? It depends on context: ‘now’ in the sense of the immediate instant, or in the wider sense, say, of ‘nowadays’.

The moment ‘now’, in the time it takes to say the word, hardly exists; it’s infinitely divisible. Is it the current minute, second, half-second, nano-second? In the process of division, we simply ‘run out of time’. The ‘world’ of infinitude can only be the ‘world’ of the imagination.

Time is the fundament of narrative for the stories of our lives; we create time by witnessing entropy, the change, or process, from order to disorder, or randomness, in a system. Yet time and its effects are as much products of our invention as of entropy.

Our perception controls the flow of time: the greater the intentionality of consciousness, the greater the meaning. An event with a high level of meaning receives a great deal of focus, and time seems to slow down.

But you say ‘now’ and that fleeting ‘present’ instantly becomes the past, that ‘ever-moving interface between past and present’ as Brett Bowden puts it in Now is not the time: Inside our obsession with the present (Iff Books, November, 2024), arguing that the present is all too often given undue significance in human affairs — privileged over both past and…