The macabre reality of time and what we ought to do with it.

The future will be enacted in the present by people who morbidly understand but also effectively use the gift of memory.

Originally appeared on Medium.

I’m posting this so that it comes up on my timeline every year.

I think social media is the new scrapbook. I grew up in an epoch of history where you actually had to take a picture, with a camera, print the picture, cut it with a variety of scissor styles, glue the picture onto paper, and then add various stickers or handwritten descriptions in order to eloquently remember a moment. Technology has changed the game. But it hasn’t changed the human desire to remember the past.

Why do we sentient beings have such a propensity to bask in the nostalgia of what is now gone?

There is a multiplicity of value to recollection and remembrance. It maintains heritage, aids in collective development beyond the lifespan of individuals, and also acts as a reminder of your dependence on other people and the past. Having a memory ensures that we don’t repeat mistakes, that we continue progress appropriately, and that we live according to a strain of existence that we are reliant on. We are traveling the map of life. Best to use the markings of our previous travels and former travelers. In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you have been.

All of these, however, are valuable because they share one common issue.

Memory is necessary and useful in these ways because we are all going to die.

The Phenomenological Nightmare

Human beings have another problem — we only know the world to the extent that we have experienced it. This is called phenomenology and it explains why our arguments suck and why no single person is working with all the information. We only know what we know and we only know what we have seen.

It gets worse. Those experiences are always fleeting. You can’t constantly see and experience the world that covers the span of your life. Your memory is an attempt to hold onto the phenomenological reality of the world as you have come to know it.

St. Augustine, a fourth-century theologian and philosopher, brought this up in his notion of time. Call me a blasphemer, but it’s probably his greatest contribution. He was trying to explain metaphysics and how a transcendent, non-human being could interact with contingent, finite beings. Any absolute deity would have to be separate from phenomenological constraints, would have to maintain singularity, and must also, therefore, be outside of time. So, how could God be present and involved with finite creatures?

Well, for Augustine, it meant he had to take a unique angle on time. Time, Augustine claimed, is created by God. God cannot be in the existence of time (something that veers toward the modern understanding of impassivity — God is external of and unaffected by time, etc). Therefore, in order to make a case that God is involved in human life, Augustine said though we think there are three tenses of time — past, present, future — there is only actually one.

Augustine felt that past, present, and future are better described as memory, attention, and expectation because nothing exists in reality except for the present. The past, once it becomes past, no longer exists. The future, in contrast, does not yet exist. You only have the present. Augustine was the first new-age, self-help guru, by the way.

Therefore, you have the present of past things (memory), the present of present things (attention), and the present of future things (expectation). And yes, Augustine also emphasized that you can be in the present and not be present. Even the present can fail to exist if we are not aware of it. There is a difference between being somewhere and actually being there — you can be in the present, but actually, be living in a different present; like the past or the future.

For Augustine, time is simply an allusion that helps us make sense of the world. But there is an important detail in all of this — you are not God. You are not transcendent. Because you are dependent on time and its continual passing. You are finite and your life will end.

Every moment where the present becomes the past is a moment that no longer exists. This is the phenomenological nightmare.

Is that why we look to the past with sentimental longing?

Every remembered moment is a moment that is gone.

Augustine’s view of time is a bit of a theological sleight of hand. But it also articulates a subtle reality of being alive: That you only have what you know, but every present moment of knowing is constantly vanishing. Because we are finite, limited beings whose presence is constantly becoming absent.

The Death in Nostalgia

The older I get, the more I tend to reminisce on days gone by. I yearn for former moments, I shuffle through endless troughs of photographs, and I nostalgically retreat to the land of memory. The good ole’ days, right? There seems to be a linear graph of age and recollection. Maybe it is because, as the present continues, we are physically seeing life become absent. The world and the people we know slowly fade toward oblivion.

Life is a process of becoming aware of what is over. Memory reveals the finitude of time; which reveals the finitude of us who are doing the remembering.

Every time you remember something, it is like a mirror reflecting your unknown end. Memory is simply a reminder that something is finished within the span of your limited life. You can reach back in your mind, but you will never be able to experience that time in the same way again.

Maybe we make the scrapbooks and social media collages because we know we are going to die and those moments of the past are foreshadowing the inescapable end of it all. Maybe we take tons of photographs as a last-ditch effort to make this last longer than we know it will. Maybe we talk about the days of yore because we desperately wish we could have them back. Maybe we remember things because we are coming to grips with the end of our lives that is now one moment closer.

Memories, therefore, might be a way of grieving our own death.

But What About the Future?

Well, that all is a bit gloomy and a bit obvious. Yet, this function of memory doesn’t have to just be macabre. When you combine these two sentiments — that your life will inevitably expire and that every moment is now a moment that is gone — it has the possibility of catalyzing your present.

When you are fueled by the awareness of your impending demise, the memories not only are a means of mourning what is gone, they can be used to channel action. When you are honest about time, you also force yourself to be honest about the time you have left. Memories become a means for activating your imagination for the future — because you only have what you know. Memories are like a toolbox, albeit a somber one, for the next right step. In the face of a limited future, the past shows us the way to go.

Though your past reveals your unavoidable death, your past also reveals what you ought to do before your breath fades into extinction.

Where have you been? What have you seen? What is the conglomeration of your lived experience? Are there people walking a terrain that you walked decades ago? Are there regrets that are now forever out of reach that can still be redeemed in moments to come?

How can the past inform your attention to the present and your expectation for the future?

Yet, possibly of greater importance in light of your death, how can you hand those to come after you a more complete map than what you had while you were here?

You see, the human journey is a collective sojourn. What you have and experience is dependent on a chain of consciousness that brought forth the world as you know it. Humanity is a bunch of finite beings building the world one mortal life at a time. Some parts of that journey were atrocious. Others were a bit off track but found a way to lay the groundwork for progress. We tend to think that we are the first and last who will walk this road and explore this map. We look at ourselves as enlightened beings compared to the inferior nobodies who came before us. They are no match for our grandeur. But our grandeur exists because of the work they did with the tools they had. Our world presides because they brought it forward. The past gave us the map of life that we now call normal. And our current map isn’t the end. When we are honest about the speck we are in the human journey, it provides a proper sense of perspective. And when we have a proper sense of perspective, we begin to see that we will not complete the map, either. Quite possibly, the only thing we can do with our frail souls is to better allow those after us to continue what those before us started and also never finished.

The future will be enacted in the present by people who morbidly understand but also effectively use the gift of memory.

Grieve your own death with every passing moment.

For then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.