I had a dream… about the importance of living in the moment
I WOKE up around four this morning. A dream forced me to become conscious. It was about a ritual moment where someone was to be introduced to the importance of some kind of personal moral awakening.
It could have been one of my children, or it could have been someone else that has a connection to me. Or it could have been I, myself, watching myself. In the dream I was watching this process and I was aware that I was extremely anxious for some reason.
Then I also realised that the ritual process was mediated by the yellow connection line to my computer. The Telkom one to be precise. In the dream I was extremely scared that the moment could be lost, just as the yellow line as the source of meaning could be disrupted, malfunctioning, and then that the person that needed this hovering moment in time to become wise, or to be introduced to a higher level of functioning as a human being, would lose the pregnant moment.
Then I awoke. Realising that this was a special dream. My mind started to work around the dream. I remembered Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher. I remembered Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian. I remembered Carl Rogers, the psychologist, and realised that they are all contributing to my awakening from this special dream.
We are bombarded by the explosion of information but, even more so, suffocating under the never-ending stream of projections, of sitcoms, superficial films triggering skin-deep emotions, and Facebook, WhatsApp, frivolities spilling over into our conditioned ‘peer group’ comparative reactions.
Back to my dream, and my personal interpretation of it. A wise old departed psychologist friend would have most likely prompted me to look at different interpretations; and he would have been right, because this is the essence of my dream. When Sartre lived, he wrote about the utmost importance of the existential moment.
That not the documented and filed past, not the conditioned future shaped by television, the internet and the accompanying marionette displays by all people playing out the part of the fixed Zeitgeist, be the leitmotiv of our daily sojourns around the sun, but complete attention and sensitivity to life as it happens around and within ourselves.
More so, as Buber wrote in his book I and Thou, to be awakened to the very specialness of the other, not being you or a projection of you. And Rogers told us to listen most carefully to the unspoken words of people we engage in talking, or that pass us by in the moments of life.
We only have the moment, this moment, not the moments, to be real and standing on the side of humanity there as it happens. Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer, spoke about the ‘decisive moment’ for taking a photograph.
Moments too early, moments too late, will be forever the caricature of what could have, or should have, been.
My dream. We encounter life and people around us and we react to them, to the stances of life as it happens. But even if we have a connected ‘yellow line’ – be that The Bible, The Koran, The Wealth of Nations, The Communist Manifesto, Mozart or Bob Dylan – the disruption to authenticity and integrated moral considerations will all become ‘comic books’ and mere propagandist repertoire if we do not engage with our whole integrity and human compassion in all the passing moments of life. To be looking out for the essence of the moment. Nothing will save us from superficiality if we are not extremely sensitive to the complexity of life as such. And without the total engagement of ourselves in all the existential moments that come up in front of us, we will not even notice the gradual disconnection to the ‘yellow lines’ existing between us all.
From the waiter in the coffee shop to the woman trying to sell you a magazine to make a living, from the child with the sad eyes in the class, from the woman who appears late at night on the streets, from the businessman displaying his name on the registration plate of his gleaming vehicle, to the hopeless ones watching you passing by, the risk of disconnecting to pulsating life and the consequential robotic displays of life will take us down into darkness day by day.