I’ve found, recently, there are at least two very distinct ways to experience being in the present.
Each is its own kind of box.
Instead of being smooshed across space and time, I come into the present — this place and time.
Here’s the thing, it turns out my actual experience of this thing called the present can be either a box in space or time.
I’m not just being cleaver, this is not word play.
Each is it’s own possibility, and the experience of each is quite distinct.
I wasn’t aware of there being two modes because the box of present that I experience is almost exclusively in space — at least until recently.
Being in the present is being in the present.
However, the box nature of the present that we experience can be in space or in time.
Go with me for a moment.
At this moment, as I write this, I am pretty much in the present.
In this moment I’m in my apartment.
Ya gotta be somewhere and this is the somewhere I am at the moment.
The thing is the bounding box that I experience is defined by the apartment.
The boundary my experience bumps into is “being in this space, this apartment.”
That small reaction voice that sits by the side narrating periodically reaches out to the past and the future bumping into “stuck in this apartment.” That’s not so freaky. I can handle that.
However, if I am experiencing the present in time — meaning the box is a time box — then, when this small reaction voice is here and it reaches out to the past and the future it bumps into “stuck in this slice of time.” That is, for me, hovering way close to the edge of claustrophobia. That is a box of a very different sort.
This state can be experienced as a placement or confinement depending on a toggle.
The box doesn’t change. There is still a boundary.
What does change is our experience of being within a box.
Placement: This is where I am.
Confinement: I cannot get out of where I am.
Still a box. Still being in the present.
But one is simply “I am here.”
The other can escalate into: “I am totally mudder frogging stuck here.”
And this “toggle”?
I expect the most apt pointer to what this toggle may be is “attitude.”
And the word toggle to me suggests leaning one way or another too much can throw me off balance into the other experience.
The above could be interpreted as a discussion of two different states of “being in the present” or as experiencing a single state in two different ways.
If forced to choose I would favor the first frame.
Fortunately we don’t have to choose, and I’m not ready or willing to limit that at this time.