🪴 Stability is an illusion
This article was written while listening to music like this
Nothing is stable.
That is axiomatic in this universe.
In relative terms and as human beings, we expect some stability in our lives.
The more we can project the perception of particular events or the state of our present (lease, work contracts, good health, desire) in time, the more our perceptual illusion of stability.
It's wonderful when that happens and you can experience life as something stable and feel that you are standing on some kind of solid psychological ground.
Even greater when you can embrace impermanence and enjoy that rented flat in your favorite city or that night in the mountains under the stars as if there were no thing on the horizon of time to think about. No regrets, no stress about coming back to a less exciting routine.
When you reach that you are technically stretching the awareness of ¹your present to the fullest. In an ideal state, the present consciousness or awareness would tend to the infinite, timelessly.
In reality, this tendency responds to a limiting behavior (asymptotic), like an event horizon.
Beyond the event horizon lies our past like our personal black hole, metaphorically speaking.
Mindfulness could be a tool (techne) or practical wisdom (phronesis) to extend the degree of attention in our present moment, while we decreasing the amount of attention focus in our future or past.
As shown in the graphic on top, our attention can hold different positions according to the tendency to think about the future or the past. The x-axis represents time consciousness (understood simply as thinking about events in the past or imagining events to happen in the future) while the y-axis represents present consciousness.
This is merely a draft model that doesn't pretend to take all complexities of human attention and time perception into consideration but could help to illustrate psychological entities or existential concepts like anxiety, nostalgia, and desire (sorry, Lacan).
What is interesting about this model, is that it shows present consciousness as a detached faculty. Some authors (Including a Buddhist theoric of which I don't remember the name) oppose present consciousness as the faculty of focusing entirely on perception and the sensorial field, to time consciousness as related to other mental phenomena like memory and language (we can't detach language from the flow of time, and we make sense of the world thanks to internal logic operations that are entirely dependent of notions like causality).
¹Notice that I use personal pronouns to refer to categories of time as past and future since they are completely entangled with our perception, as I recently learned from this book: The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli