How To Live In the Moment

Reflections on the puzzling nature of the present.

Can we truly live in the moment?

“Live in the moment” is probably one of the most popular and widely-given pieces of life advice in the English-speaking world.

When people say that they’re trying to live in the moment—or when they use the Latin motto carpe diem—what they usually mean is something like this: forget the past and the future, just enjoy the here and now.

On one level, the advice is surely sound. Unlike gods, who are supposed to exist simultaneously in all times and all places, we mortals can only ever exist in the present. For us, the past has, by definition, gone, and the future is, by definition, yet to be. The present is all we have—so the injunction to live in the moment works as a way of reminding ourselves of this.

If we reflect on it further, however, we find that living in the moment is more complicated than it initially seems. In fact, it might even be the case that any given moment contains a degree of past and future. 

How could this be? And does that make it impossible to truly live in the moment?

The Puzzling Nature of the Present

We generally think of “the moment” as roughly equivalent to the present. What, then, is the present? Generally, we regard the present as the distinct point of time occurring this very instant, or, put another way, this moment right now.

This common-sense way of thinking about the present makes it easy to measure (using seconds, minutes, and so on). However, understanding the present as a distinct point in time may not actually be true to how we experience it. Our experience of the present might be better characterized as an ever-flowing river, running out of the past and into the present. 

This, roughly, is the view of Edmund Husserl, one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. Husserl is known for inventing a philosophical method called phenomenology, which remains widely used and studied today. Phenomenology consists of detailed description of phenomena (roughly, things) from the point of view of the person encountering them. With this broad aim, it’s possible to do a phenomenological analysis of literally anything—Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, used the method to describe things as varied as the viscous ooze of honey and the befuddlement of looking for an absent friend. 

Deeper topics unsurprisingly make for the most enlightening analyses, however. Husserl’s analysis of time is a case in point. Husserl observes that when we try to describe the present moment exactly as we experience it, we find that it’s, in fact, permeated by both the past and future. 

It’s a radical and perhaps counter-intuitive idea—but it does make sense. To try to understand Husserl”s point clearly, let’s take the concrete example of walking into a café. The latter involves a continuous, unfolding sequence of actions: opening the door, stepping inside, scanning the café for a free table, heading toward one, grasping a chair, sitting down, and so on.

What’s crucial for Husserl is that as I experience each of these events in turn, the ones preceding it are carried along, held over, into my present—meaning that I perceive all of them as forming a single sequence. William Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun that “The past is never dead. It's not even past,” and for us, this is very literally true: although my opening of the café door technically belongs to the past, it ekes into my present movements toward the table. (It doesn’t stay this way permanently, of course—eventually, each of these events will fall away from my present and become accessible only through an act of recollection.)

If there’s a degree of the past in the present, then there’s also a degree of the future. For example, as I go to grab the café chair, I have certain unconscious expectations about it: that when I touch it, it will be solid, cold to the touch, hefty, and so on. These expectations are confined to the very near future of course, but in addition to this, I might, at the very same time, be mentally absorbed in the more distant future: thinking about where I’m going after the café and the errands I need to run, or about an upcoming holiday. 

What all this means is that just as the past bleeds into the present, the present spills over into the future, too.

Focusing on the Now

The above is only a simple sketch of the way we experience the present, but the upshot is this: even when we’re living in the moment, the past and future are intertwined to some degree, bookending our present. Our lives are like that of the Roman God Janus, who is always depicted with two faces: one looking forward and one looking backward.

Does this mean, then, that it’s impossible to live in the moment? Not at all—we just have to be honest about what it involves. Living in the moment can’t mean that I completely discard the past and future, leaving me with only the here and now. It can, however, mean that I better appreciate my present by focusing in on it and not dwelling excessively on the past or obsessing over possible futures. The present, even if it stretches into both past and future, is all we have, and cultivating a gratitude for that window onto the world is no bad thing.

How can we do this, though? What can help us better appreciate the present moment?

One way—perhaps the easiest way—is through the practice of mindfulness. With its roots in meditative practice stretching back thousands of years, mindfulness aims at bringing the practitioner’s awareness to a given phenomenon—real or imagined—for a sustained period of time. The practitioner usually sits in silence to accomplish this, though by no means has to: there’s also mindful movement, similar to Tai Chi, as well as mindful walking, which entails paying constant attention to one’s footfall. 

The best example of mindfulness, though, is its most common form of practice: mindful breathing. When mindfully breathing, the practitioner has to sit and focus on the breath—and that’s it. Yet rather than this being boring or unenlightening, it can be a rich and rewarding experience. As the events leading up to me sitting and practicing fall away from my present, it becomes easier to close in on the breath and just try to be—nothing more and nothing less. 

The great challenge with mindful breathing, however, is not letting the future derail our focus: it’s practically impossible to do so, in fact, because skipping ahead is what the mind does. As we’ve seen, our very perception of time involves reaching ahead to what we expect or wish to happen. So once we sit for long enough and focus on the same thing for long enough, the mind succumbs to its habit of looking ahead to the next thing—and before you know it, you’ve left the breath far behind and are mentally planning your dinner.

Most first-time practitioners of mindfulness will discover that their mind begins to do this after about five breaths—but that’s okay. It happens to everyone, even, apparently, the most seasoned practitioner. The point is to keep returning to the object of the practice, calmly restoring focus on I without judging oneself, and the more one does so, the more one becomes adept at spotting when the mind is drifting away.

The great value of this lies, in part, in helping us to live in the moment. As stated, we can never escape the past and future, but through mindfulness, we can learn to look at the here and now with greater attention, and with it comes the ability to better appreciate the window onto the world we’re lucky enough to enjoy. Through mindfulness, we can train ourselves to become less drawn away by what’s past or what may never be and become better attuned to what is.

So living in the moment is possible, after a fashion—and practicing mindfulness might just be the way to do it.