I Made it All Up!

In a recent blog I wrote: “the only real truth we will ever have is in the moment. The rest is a result of confabulation, imagination and longing.” One of my three thoughtful brothers (all three pictured to the left) replied: “I would love to know what moved you to use ‘confabulation, imagination and longing’ to describe everything but the ‘moment’ in which we live. Not that I disagree, just an interesting description of everything else.”

He's my little brother - he better not disagree! Now that we're clear about that... "confabulation" is a great word. It reminds me of a con man with flatulence rolling around on inflated inner tubes. But alas, the denotation is: “to fill in gaps in memory with fabrication.” Using a recent incident: I had a clear memory of something occurring. Blank looks all around; no one else in the family remembers it – not even the person it supposedly happened to. How could this be possible!? Did it happen? Did it happen differently or in a different context or to a different person? I was flabbergasted (that word sounds like what happens when you let go of an inflated balloon that has not been tied. Sometimes I feel like a balloon that has not been tied). How could my memory fail me so completely? I didn’t set out to fabricate a memory to fill in the blank, but evidently my imagination took over.

Memory is fickle – we might not even know when we are fabricating. Everyone generally has a slightly different take on the past. You might be able to agree: yes, we all went to the Grand Canyon together, but everyone will remember different visual, sounds and experiences. Siblings might agree that they all have the same mother, but they all know her differently. So, the past is unreliable. The future is no more reliable. Our imagination draws pictures in our mind about what’s going to happen and if we let our egos get attached to those pictures, chances are we’re going to be let down big time. Expectations are a direct line to disappointment. Longing fuels our visions of tomorrow, but according to Neale Donald Walsch, longing in this moment shows the universe we want more longing. Whatever state of being we are emanating will grow stronger. The key is to get to the end feeling that any person or place inspires in us… and conjure that feeling now, in this moment. (If you want a great book that teaches joy and hope check out Martha Beck’s Steering By Starlight.)

So, this leaves this moment. What are we going to do right now? Or now? Or now? :o Philosophers explain that we are always in motion, like a pendulum, with only slight hesitations. We perceive “moments” as though they are still, but that is an illusion, so even the moment is fluid. Still, it is where we are. In those hesitations, are we engaging our senses? So many books such as A Course in Miracles or Eckart Tolle’s The Power of Now teach us how to interject ourselves into the moment, how to value what is and focus less on what was or what will be. The moment is intimate; it asks us to acknowledge what we feel about ourselves and our relationship to others and what we’d like to accomplish before we die.

The future is a guessing game and the past is a series of little deaths, of moments we will never recapture, half of which we might have made up. The only way to regret less and choose joy is to be fully awake right now.