Being in the Moment

When I have a long train ride, I spend it in one of two very different ways. I might plan a meeting or a trip to a conference, catching up with material my AI agent has spit out for me, and texting one of my employees. I’ll stare at the black-and-orange Claude interface, alt-tab to WhatsApp to type something out at the speed of light, and already start considering how I might knock some items off my to-do list in the minutes before disembarking, to appear to the CEO like I’m efficient (you’ve all done it). I’ll then jam my laptop, its unwieldy charger, and its mouse into my backpack before hopping off the car. Most everyone else around me will either be doing the same, or they’ll stare at their phone screens with a bored look.

On the other hand, I might open a philosophical treatise in Ancient Greek and spend an entire hour getting through three pages. I’ll look at the squiggly line (tilde) above a vowel and hear its melody playing in my head. I’ll connect this melody with the rest of the sounds and start seeing wise, bearded men, maybe too smart for their own good, before my mind’s eye. I’ll be transported to the distant past and have a giddy sensation as some of humanity’s oldest wisdom materializes before me among jugs of wine, togas, marble columns, figs, and cheese. A classicist who reads the above description will be shocked at the inaccurate details, but that’s not the point; the point is that beautiful things move you, they stir emotions, facts be damned. One option, the one happening on my laptop, is rapid-fire and mechanical. A machine (Claude) could literally do it. The second is pleasant and vivid.

I’ve tried getting into meditation a few times and failed badly in every attempt—I simply cannot concentrate on nothing for even five minutes—but I remember one exercise that was very instructive among my many unfruitful ones. As I was pacing around my house counting steps, I suddenly realized how active my brain was, optimizing things. I was weighing this and considering that, all the while in mental overdrive. It’s a perfect zone to be in when you’re facing real, serious problems that are actually in your power to control, but worrying about the future without respite is no way to live. I feel experiences I love for their own sake are the remedy for this slow-and-certain burnout. They immerse me in the moment, and though time doesn’t slow down, whatever a romantic might say, my experience of it certainly does. Precisely because I mentioned Ancient Greek, I want to describe this feeling of being completely absorbed by the most distant experience imaginable from reading Plato, a football match, to show that you can be in the moment in any number of ways.

Some football games are snoozefests of a sort much worse than what meditation is to me. But, when the stakes are high and the air in the stands surges hot into the pitch, all I feel is the volatile concoction in my heart ready to erupt in joy; or sorrow; or anger, made even more unstable by not knowing which of these it’ll be. When everyone in the stands feels the same, talks the same, and wears the same battledress, it creates a sense of community that amplifies my feelings and sucks me in so that nothing else matters to me for ninety minutes (plus stoppage time). I think the best demonstration I can think of for how deeply you can be absorbed in a match (and for how beautiful the highest and lowest moments in football are), is that the only memory I have of a match that’s stronger than the memory of the match itself comes from a time I was in love. Consummate emotion is often a better reason to wake up in the morning than a hundred nagging tasks.

It’s inevitable that we take care of our affairs. To do otherwise, to never apply ourselves to material concerns, would turn us into peculiar and idle types, as well as unreliable to the people we love. Yet once my duty to the material is complete, my imagination takes me elsewhere. Although my fantasies may be exaggerating, they tell me I would happily ruin my knees forever to parry a critical penalty for my team (Maccabi), and that I would gladly swallow poison for a tenth of Socrates’ intellectual contribution to mankind. In the blink of an eye, I would be fulfilled in realms that mean much more to the world than my immediate problems.