As humans, we have been given a fantastic gift–that of time travel. Our minds can wander back through our pasts, recounting what has brought us to this current place. We can contemplate the vast expanse of the future and how our actions might change its course. We can also exist in a simple state of being, where we allow what is directly present wash over us.
As Thanatists, we don’t privilege any one of these ways of thinking over another. They all have their purpose, and in fact, Thanatism, though not without creating some difficulties in each of them, overall helps us to be our better selves in all three of these temporal modes. Having said that, in our modern world, we seem to have a particular difficulty with being present. Whereas we seem to have no issues wallowing in the slights of the past or endlessly worrying about what the future may bring, simply sitting and being in the moment can prove elusive.
We tend to lose ourselves in the present. Sometimes we enjoy this, like when we’re fully engaged in an interesting problem and it results in a state of “flow”. The most common of these present states of lostness, however, is what I call “mindlessness”. This is where we flit about our day, doing our daily routine almost unconsciously. We wake up and just start doing without even processing what is happening, and before we know it, our day is done.
I don’t mean to denigrate this mode of present being by calling it “mindless”. We humans need these moments of thoughtless action to get through our days. Having said that, it can be very easy as a human for this mindlessness to become our only mode of present being. And in this case, life can pass us by without us taking the occasional moment to fully experience the now.
I noticed the impoverished nature of this mode of mindlessness most profoundly when I had children. I found myself constantly rushing through our daily routines. Throwing in a little unhelpful futural thinking, my wife and I would always fantasize about the next stage–I can’t wait until they can sleep through the night, I can’t wait until they don’t need a stroller, I can’t wait until they start school. What I realized about losing myself in the mindless routines of raising children, however, was that at sometime in the future, as if I almost never existed with them, I would be saying to myself, “I can’t believe they’re already gone.”
The opposite of “mindlessness” is of course “mindfulness”. This is when we take a moment to stop doing and actually fully participate in the present moment. We’ll discuss later some specific practices where Thanatism can help us spend a few moments just being present with what is before us, but even without these, I think you’ll find that Thanatism, as a belief alone, will occasionally wrench you from your everydayness and help you find the moments to appreciate your life and be more present.
The reason for this is that, as Thanatists, we fully accept that the end, which we are all ineluctably rushing towards, is our own eventual non-existence. There is no post-game, where we get to sit and reflect on the life that we have just led. There is no instant replay, where we get to relive what we missed the first time. Just the opposite in fact–every moment, once passed, is lost to us forever.
So the next time you’re rushing your children off to school or mindlessly driving to work, I encourage you to remember that these moments, the unexceptional moments of your day-to-day routine, are in fact the majority of your life, and that they don’t have to disappear without a trace. If instead, we choose, even during the most mundane times of our lives, to take a moment to consider how short our time as living, breathing, experiencing creatures is, we can almost experience eternity in the space of a breath.