Blog Dis
When you have more past than future...
2026-09-22
Hurry up, will ya? Get busy living before you get busy dying. For before you know it, you'll reach a vital stage in your life when you surpass that point, and you won't notice at first. Eventually you will. The realization will land like the sun hitting the surface of the ocean. The sunbeams will penetrate only so far, before you figure it out. When you do finally clue in, your concerns of the past will seem trivial. You'll become focused on leaving behind a legacy, if you're able to do so, as well as to define those memorable moments where you had shined like a diamond.
I said this to two dear friends with a smile, "I've figured out how and why I'm extra-special clever... because I've finally realized that I've more past than I do future," to which they didn't show a reaction, so I followed up with "this makes every day when I live in the present moment that much more meaningful to me."
This realization of limited time is a freeing experience. You literally feel like someone put the key into the keyhole of your existence, to open the iron-gate, that impenetrable locked door, to usher you into a new mindset. Whereas, in our teens, 20s and even 30s, we are, for the most part, less concerned with the passage of our time and lives because we're focused more on partying, finishing up school, and landing somewhere that enables our life and skills to grow.
Time is an illusive measuring tool. When we're enjoying the best of activities, like intimacy or a sport, a fast-paced movie, an enthralling book, it all races past our nose far quicker than we want. Whereas, when we're forced to sit down to a plate of boiled cabbage with deep-fried chicken livers, we want someone to stick a fork into the back of our hands, just to know that we're still alive, because time crawls like a human dying of thirst in the desert. I try not to do this any more, to imagine or dread what's coming in the evening, or the morning, or even to look forward to doing anything too much. Whenever I do this, I can almost guarantee that I've nailed something into this event's coffin.
To live in the moment means that your mind, body and heart are focused precisely on what's happening in front of you. This line of thinking brings me to the status of being an author, someone who writes, who lives in the moment, while staring at a blank screen or a white page, waiting for inspiration to come. There's nothing amiss for that period of time when the words don't flow. Begin anyway. Write and watch what happens. The words will start to flow, in trickles at first, before words gush like a waterfall. If you're still stuck, switch up gears and write something unrelated to your current work-in-progress. This is my primary purpose for posting my blog, to exercise my brain and writing skills on an alternate path. You'll find that action leads to more action, and this will hopefully lead you back to that blank screen.
One young would-be author had asked me perhaps the most vital question. "How you do write the novel?" I answered, "One chapter at a time."
You can't write in the past. You can't write in the future. You can only write in the present moment, as you sit there, in front of your screen or a blank piece of paper, notebook, attempting to pull ideas out of your ass. There may be plots, carefully crafted with clever ideas woven in between, yet when it comes time to flesh out plot lines, don't be surprised when you veer off course, and the organic process takes over.
This is no different than what it means to live a full life, similar to writing, to embrace the organic process of trying not to engineer a perfect story, your life story. I can assure you that nothing turns out the way your expectations had envisioned how it would turn out. Some of the most successful persons I know were equipped with one degree and ended up pursuing a different life path, completely unrelated to this degree.
Then there's sleep, that coveted period of time when our unconscious mind goes to work, to spin up wacky ideas and events, people that have no purpose being in our heads, who invade our dreams, and twist and turn our emotions until our hearts pound real hard. I've woken up from such dreams, and then to roll over, half-asleep, to reach for my black ink pen and wee book that I keep by my bedside for such purposes, along with a mini-flashlight, clutched between my teeth, to jot down the dream remnants, before they fade. I've gleaned great bits from these dreams, some of which appeared in my first three novels. The dreams were beyond anything I could've conjured. These dreams helped me to shape the plot, another wrinkle to writing that I hadn't been prepared for, and perhaps maybe I should have but wasn't.
I've attended plenty of paid workshops throughout my author career, too, on writing erotica and fantasy, how to edit and market books. I've given workshops at fantasy exhibitions too on writing fantasy novels and during these sessions, where I'd deliver an hour-long presentation, I'd stress to the authors in attendance that you'll never know time more intimately, and how fast and slow it passes, than when you write.
Time is an abstraction of reality. It doesn't make sense to me why we delude ourselves into believing that we're the masters of time. For all the thousands of years that humans have existed, time has continued to pass us by, as it always does, always shall. Humans, being the clever beings that we regard ourselves to be, have invented devices along the way to break down the components of time, to measure seconds, to make them visible to consciousness. This happened back in the 17th Century when the pendulum clock was invented.
In Ancient times, humans marked time using daylight and seasons (farming planting cycles) as well as sundials, to track time's slippery passage. We owe it to the Egyptians and the Babylonians who split the day into 12 parts, using what is known as base 60-math, and this in turn evolved into our 24-hour day and 60-minute hour. Roman emperors had also provided the names for the months of July and August in our calendars, while the rest trace back to Roman gods and myths. Apparently, both Caligula and Nero tried to rename some of the months after themselves, only this didn't last beyond their lifespan. Finally, in the 19th and 20th centuries, we introduced standard time zones, and did so by way of abandoning "sun" times with a sundial.
Our obsession with time has been with us since we began to recognize peak periods for doing things, and how this in turn had inspired fisherman to make their own connections with how well or how badly their time might potentially go, while out on the open seas. One of the oldest expressions I know of, having a father born in Newfoundland was that fishermen would look into the sky before heading out to sea and they would plan accordingly, based on what their eyes had recognized: sunset in morning sailor's warning, sunset at night sailor's delight.
Now, I rely heavily on my weather APP on my mobile, to gauge when it's the best time to head out to cycle, depending on the weather forecast. It's not always right of course, as to be expected, but at least they're trying their best to apply the latest technology to help us plan our activities during the day a little better. It is called a forecast for a reason, rather than an absolute.
So, and as the title of this blog post would suggest, your future awaits you, while you're still alive. It's OK for you to regard it this way, that you've got all the time in the world to begin that gargantuan project, the one you've been procrastinating over for years. Though, I might be inclined to encourage you to start now, rather than wait for later. I'm not really sure how many days, weeks, months or years there are in 'later' because nobody knows this reality. If you work on the basis that the day you're currently living and thinking in, may be your very last day on Earth, what exactly will you do with this precious time?
Speaking only for myself, I'll be writing, something I've been doing since I was six years old.
I can't seem to stop writing, and I don't want to stop. I surely don't predicate my behavior on knowing that there's a boatload of money at the end of my effort, which has never been the reason why I write from the get go. I write because I'm compelled to do so, and I don't judge my effort or time spent based on how many novels I've written. With some measure of self-assurance, I can only assure you that taking nine years to write my last novel, number seven, sure did feel like a really long time.
And on it goes... tick tock.
I said this to two dear friends with a smile, "I've figured out how and why I'm extra-special clever... because I've finally realized that I've more past than I do future," to which they didn't show a reaction, so I followed up with "this makes every day when I live in the present moment that much more meaningful to me."
This realization of limited time is a freeing experience. You literally feel like someone put the key into the keyhole of your existence, to open the iron-gate, that impenetrable locked door, to usher you into a new mindset. Whereas, in our teens, 20s and even 30s, we are, for the most part, less concerned with the passage of our time and lives because we're focused more on partying, finishing up school, and landing somewhere that enables our life and skills to grow.
Time is an illusive measuring tool. When we're enjoying the best of activities, like intimacy or a sport, a fast-paced movie, an enthralling book, it all races past our nose far quicker than we want. Whereas, when we're forced to sit down to a plate of boiled cabbage with deep-fried chicken livers, we want someone to stick a fork into the back of our hands, just to know that we're still alive, because time crawls like a human dying of thirst in the desert. I try not to do this any more, to imagine or dread what's coming in the evening, or the morning, or even to look forward to doing anything too much. Whenever I do this, I can almost guarantee that I've nailed something into this event's coffin.
To live in the moment means that your mind, body and heart are focused precisely on what's happening in front of you. This line of thinking brings me to the status of being an author, someone who writes, who lives in the moment, while staring at a blank screen or a white page, waiting for inspiration to come. There's nothing amiss for that period of time when the words don't flow. Begin anyway. Write and watch what happens. The words will start to flow, in trickles at first, before words gush like a waterfall. If you're still stuck, switch up gears and write something unrelated to your current work-in-progress. This is my primary purpose for posting my blog, to exercise my brain and writing skills on an alternate path. You'll find that action leads to more action, and this will hopefully lead you back to that blank screen.
One young would-be author had asked me perhaps the most vital question. "How you do write the novel?" I answered, "One chapter at a time."
You can't write in the past. You can't write in the future. You can only write in the present moment, as you sit there, in front of your screen or a blank piece of paper, notebook, attempting to pull ideas out of your ass. There may be plots, carefully crafted with clever ideas woven in between, yet when it comes time to flesh out plot lines, don't be surprised when you veer off course, and the organic process takes over.
This is no different than what it means to live a full life, similar to writing, to embrace the organic process of trying not to engineer a perfect story, your life story. I can assure you that nothing turns out the way your expectations had envisioned how it would turn out. Some of the most successful persons I know were equipped with one degree and ended up pursuing a different life path, completely unrelated to this degree.
Then there's sleep, that coveted period of time when our unconscious mind goes to work, to spin up wacky ideas and events, people that have no purpose being in our heads, who invade our dreams, and twist and turn our emotions until our hearts pound real hard. I've woken up from such dreams, and then to roll over, half-asleep, to reach for my black ink pen and wee book that I keep by my bedside for such purposes, along with a mini-flashlight, clutched between my teeth, to jot down the dream remnants, before they fade. I've gleaned great bits from these dreams, some of which appeared in my first three novels. The dreams were beyond anything I could've conjured. These dreams helped me to shape the plot, another wrinkle to writing that I hadn't been prepared for, and perhaps maybe I should have but wasn't.
I've attended plenty of paid workshops throughout my author career, too, on writing erotica and fantasy, how to edit and market books. I've given workshops at fantasy exhibitions too on writing fantasy novels and during these sessions, where I'd deliver an hour-long presentation, I'd stress to the authors in attendance that you'll never know time more intimately, and how fast and slow it passes, than when you write.
Time is an abstraction of reality. It doesn't make sense to me why we delude ourselves into believing that we're the masters of time. For all the thousands of years that humans have existed, time has continued to pass us by, as it always does, always shall. Humans, being the clever beings that we regard ourselves to be, have invented devices along the way to break down the components of time, to measure seconds, to make them visible to consciousness. This happened back in the 17th Century when the pendulum clock was invented.
In Ancient times, humans marked time using daylight and seasons (farming planting cycles) as well as sundials, to track time's slippery passage. We owe it to the Egyptians and the Babylonians who split the day into 12 parts, using what is known as base 60-math, and this in turn evolved into our 24-hour day and 60-minute hour. Roman emperors had also provided the names for the months of July and August in our calendars, while the rest trace back to Roman gods and myths. Apparently, both Caligula and Nero tried to rename some of the months after themselves, only this didn't last beyond their lifespan. Finally, in the 19th and 20th centuries, we introduced standard time zones, and did so by way of abandoning "sun" times with a sundial.
Our obsession with time has been with us since we began to recognize peak periods for doing things, and how this in turn had inspired fisherman to make their own connections with how well or how badly their time might potentially go, while out on the open seas. One of the oldest expressions I know of, having a father born in Newfoundland was that fishermen would look into the sky before heading out to sea and they would plan accordingly, based on what their eyes had recognized: sunset in morning sailor's warning, sunset at night sailor's delight.
Now, I rely heavily on my weather APP on my mobile, to gauge when it's the best time to head out to cycle, depending on the weather forecast. It's not always right of course, as to be expected, but at least they're trying their best to apply the latest technology to help us plan our activities during the day a little better. It is called a forecast for a reason, rather than an absolute.
So, and as the title of this blog post would suggest, your future awaits you, while you're still alive. It's OK for you to regard it this way, that you've got all the time in the world to begin that gargantuan project, the one you've been procrastinating over for years. Though, I might be inclined to encourage you to start now, rather than wait for later. I'm not really sure how many days, weeks, months or years there are in 'later' because nobody knows this reality. If you work on the basis that the day you're currently living and thinking in, may be your very last day on Earth, what exactly will you do with this precious time?
Speaking only for myself, I'll be writing, something I've been doing since I was six years old.
I can't seem to stop writing, and I don't want to stop. I surely don't predicate my behavior on knowing that there's a boatload of money at the end of my effort, which has never been the reason why I write from the get go. I write because I'm compelled to do so, and I don't judge my effort or time spent based on how many novels I've written. With some measure of self-assurance, I can only assure you that taking nine years to write my last novel, number seven, sure did feel like a really long time.
And on it goes... tick tock.
