Or, With Regards To The Propinquity Of Huginn And Muninn
We cannot as a society or as individuals comprising a society perpetually exist in the moment, as a life without hindsight or foresight is invariably short-lived. We cannot be in or exist within the present moment for no moment is perpetual and that moment is already gone, our lives not encapsulating moments so much as moments formulating our lives. A life altogether without moments is forgettable, less eventful than the more tangential vegetable, but every last one of us possesses the innate ability to pick and choose which moments might formulate who we are.
And if we privately to ourselves or publicly to the world beyond ourselves confess to ever being powerlessly entrapped by a moment of times ago, socially mandated today by ways of pre-ordained, retro-subculture alternatives to non-artificial cultural heritages, then as well do we unintentionally offer the likelihood for ever being entrapped by a moment of times yet to be as the natural though altogether unexplored counterbalance to our presence of mind.
To be caught in the moment overlooks the potentials of either end. The dangers of not learning from mistakes to prevent the lazy self-destruction of hedging your bets, but also the glory of challenges overcome, and the idea of moments existing beyond any tribulation of the here and now being the focus of art and religion and hope generally. The past and the future are ideas we can engage in both as individuals and as individuals comprising a society, because to ignore either presents a darkness going nowhere faster than light ever would. But confining potential to a moment is arbitrary arrest, giving a moment of the past absolute control or giving a moment yet to be absolute control. Or giving the ever-changing moment of now absolute importance, depriving oneself from stepping ahead sight unseen with equal measures objecting to stepping back because stepping back while taking a selfie is where balconies earn their weight.
Forgiveness proactively enables, empowers and excuses the worst in us as a society or as individuals comprising a society, no differently than does forgetfulness. While forgiveness can be regarded as entitlement by either giver or receiver should the giver or receiver know a moment of clarity, clarity eternally a momentous affair, with devout frankness does forgetfulness bestow the same entitling, albeit unconsciously with neither thought of tomorrow or memory of yesterday for aligning a knowing guidance. There is no presence of mind where absent-mindedness makes a name for itself.
If preferential treatments of past moments being forgiven or forgotten entitle the worst, so too do held expectations for moments yet to transpire reveal no realities of good fortune but rather the ills of the here and now. Living in the moment means to grant history no power to influence us in the here and now whether as individuals or as individuals comprising a society, but it also means granting the future no power to influence us in the here and now, not for better or for worse. Left to their own resources however, people give of themselves to foolish matters in hopes of yet filling the same void, complimenting their incompleteness, as did god in their image. We have the capacity for recognizing past, present and future for what they truly are, a trinity for defining our brief but unfolding consciousness as individuals and as any form of collective. To favor any particular wing of that trinity is self-condemning, and to idealize a mere fraction of any particular wing is to mistake cause for effect and effect for cause. None of us is a moment, while few of us will prove more complicated than a life-changing event. Burdensome, absolutely, but uncomplicated and by extension, predictable.