Drip, drip...

I was standing under a shelter this morning, waiting for the bus, as the sky slowly wrung out its endless grey clouds over Saltburn-by-the-sea (under-the-rain). Apart from a few pauses - whilst the cloud was moved into a new wringing position? - the rain seems to have, well rained (in its raining, as the Bible would say) for a week. I knew we should have called our son Noah.

Anyway, I stood watching a drip - many drips - drip (in their dripping) from the top of the shelter to the path below. A constant drip, drip, drip (and unheard on the pavement below: splash, splash, splash). And I thought, how tied - nailed - to the present moment we are. Don't ask me why I thought that. Why did I think that, I ask myself? Water drip-drip-tick-ticks like a clock perhaps. I think my thought was that I couldn't physically make a water droplet STOP, mid-air, like you would see on a photograph. We are IN the moment, constantly, and yet the moment is constantly moving - it cannot be stopped. I know that our perception of the moment can be changed by chemicals (internal and external). I could think that the drop was moving faster or slower than it actually was. That's not the same as actually affecting the droplet though, is it? It's only affecting myself. And the flow of time cannot be affected actually (in everyday life).

Affecting yourself and not the droplet sounds like a Buddhist admonition. That's funny, because the only Buddhist literature I've read contains a saying of Thich Nhat Hanh which fits snugly into this post, and it's stayed with me ever since reading the book:

dwell in the present moment, it is a wonderful moment.

I think being aware of the moment, as I was whilst watching the water drip from the shelter, can be a very useful experience (which you can have whenever you choose). And some assert that this is the path to immortality - that an infinity of time is perceptible within the shortest moment. Perhaps in a way, if the moment is all we have (after all, what are memories but past moments?) then we have as much now as we would have if we lived forever - we are living forever now, within the (unperceived) moment, which we could slice into smaller and smaller moments, without end (this reminds me of this). Yet the moment itself is just as fleeting, it does not change. We are carried along on a string of moments, all connected, to our deaths.

This is made poignantly clear in The Sweetshop Owner (spoilers ahead), where the main character becomes insidiously trapped in a routine (outside the moment?) in which past and present blur; a (final) walk becomes confused with a race run at school (we never find out if he won, only that he run), waiting for a daughter who deserted (or better: deserts, present tense) him becomes waiting for death itself ("she will come, she will come"). His daughter does not come, and the story ends a moment before his own death - as it must, being told in the first-person. His death, unheard by the reader, is like the silent splash of the water droplet on the pavement. A reviewer on Amazon(.co.uk) complains

One thing I hate is books that end inconclusively, especially when you've had the patience and persistence to see it through to the last page.

I think he wanted to hear the splash. Or at least for the daughter to come, and give meaning to the main character's life, right at the end. This is why I love the book so much - and why Mr Reviewer above didn't? - it is true to life, with all of its mundane, unseen and unheard tragedies. Go and read a fairy tale if you want closure. Me? I'm dwelling in this moment, it is a wonderful (but wet) moment.