h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Did you recognise the title? It's from Dickens' "A Christmas Carol":

“Come in, -- come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before!”

He's probably the single best example of someone who lives in the now. He has no concept of past or future. He just enjoys the moment.

I sometimes wish I could be like that, unencumbered by either regret or trepidation.

Having said that, I have an elderly relative who's suffering from dementure, and she appears to have lost the faculty to remember her past or to plan for the future. If I ring her, she'll suddenly put the phone down to attend to a pan she can hear boiling over in the kitchen, then never return to the call. I can shout "Hello … Hello" but she won't hear it, of course. By the time she's reached the kitchen she's forgotten all about the phone call. She's preparing her dinner. I can listen to her happily singing to herself as she goes about it. She may wander back past the phone later that evening and notice the phone receiver dangling, but I'll have long gone by then, as will the memory of the call.

[Amy P]

Do you envy your relative in a way?

I've never managed to live in the moment, I wrote my first 'list of things to achieve in the next 5 years' when I was 13. I probably don't enjoy the moment because I'm always looking at the future.

I'm pretty happy living in the present. I get a bit nervous when planning for the future. The distant future, anyway, I can handle short term! I've always put it down to having such a poor memory I forget the past, and such a poor imagination I can't imagine what's coming next.

I think you do a good job of living in the present, Vip. Being 'in the moment' is something to strive for, say I.

A few years ago, I heard a programme on the radio. It was made by a journalist about his mother, who had Alzheimer's. She was otherwise healthy, and lived in a comfortable place in Vermont.

Apparently, every time he and his (male) partner came to visit, she enjoyed every minute of it. When she returned from her outing, she said, 'Is this my apartment? What a nice place!'

Every time, the two men had to explain that they were married. Each time, she said, 'Oh, that's right, you can do that now. I'm so glad.' She liked her son-in-law - better, she jokingly claimed, than she did her son.

I think the lesson there is: wherever and whenever you go, there you are. So we should work on our personalities.

I think that works well when life is good.

My grandmother had a friend called Mildred who got dementia, for many years Mildreds husband had worked alongside my grandfather in a chemist's shop, though he died soon after his retirement and my Grandfather was well for another 30 years. When Mildred began to get dementia every day at 6pm there would be a phone call.

'Is your husband home from the shop yet? My Jack hasn't come back and I'm worried'

'No Mildred, they don't work at the shop any more, Jack's died 15 years ago'.

Every day for 5 years Grandmother told her that her husband had died. She eventually got a photograph of his grave and put in her on her mantlepiece but it didn't work. My grandfather was eventually got tired of it, he once said

"Why do we have to go and visit Mildred and have the same conversation again? Why don't we just ring her up and say 'Well it was nice to see you today, we're home safe,' and she'd say 'yes it was wasn't it thank you for coming'"

I agree - if the circumstances are more difficult, the rediscovery can be painful.

I'd like to be more in the now, or rather I'd like not to be so concerned about the other tenses. But I suppose it's having that capacity that makes us more intelligent than other creatures.

I think trying to micromanage reality is the road to pain.

Projecting likely futures is the whole of intelligence. It requires modelling the past.

Of course it brings problems. Seeing the balance is the whole of philosophy.

Just a personal note;
Several years ago, when I was young and foolish, rather than old and foolish as I am now, I learned a lesson I try to remember.

It was about 3:30 on a long Friday afternoon in the office. As one of the assistant manager was walking by, I muttered to myself "Come on Five O'clock!" I did not realize I had said it aloud until he turned and looked at me.

"Don't wish your life away", he said, there was something in the tone of his voice, wise, sad, but not corrective, that made his word sink in.

Over time I have tried to keep this as at least part of my focus.



FS

Wow... talk about synchronicity, or the Lattice o'Coincidence. At the end of a rerun of The Big Bang Theory just now was this vanity card from the show's creator:


CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #263

ME: I believe that watching tonight's show might constitute a spiritual experience.
YOU: That's a pretty bold statement. How do you figure?
ME: Glad you asked. Since the concept of past and future is entirely man-made (ask any other living creature about past and future and all you'll get is a dumb, non-comprehending stare), then it follows that if there is a god, a unifying spirit of the universe, be it "intelligent" or simply a pervasively unifying quantum particle sort of deal, then the present, "the constantly unfolding now," is the only possible place it can exist. Which brings me to my bold assertion: If you laughed at any time during tonight's show, you had to be paying attention. If you were paying attention it means you were, for that moment, in "the now" -- the same place as the previously mentioned pervasive, unifying quantum particle we, as a species, enjoy worshipping and committing genocide over. Ergo, you had a spiritual experience.
YOU: Assuming you're right, so what?
ME: So what?! This is huge! If a simple sitcom can lead to communion with the eternal, then I can make a case for my work having religious significance. Next step... The Church of Chuckology and a tax break! Ooh, maybe even a sleepy little burg in Florida I can call my own.


Source: http://www.chucklorre.com/index.php?p=263

Sure. Anything that only makes sense to humans is spiritual. So food, sneezing, fighting and sex aren't, jokes are.

I do that; half make a cup of then rush to do something on the computer while I remember. Last night I woke and it was dark and quiet; I was troubled by how you fit a line to data points, after all in the daytime I had been interested in movements in the price of gold and came across the MACD indicator and EMA or exponential moving average and not east midlands airport.

My memory is so vague and after hours I decided it was best to keep things simple and use vertical differences along simple data points but for the life of me couldn't see how to minimise the sum or even if the sum was the way to go. Lying awake increasingly depressed I thought if I square the differences then I can use differentiation on a and b since here x is fixed, but couldn't for the life of me visualise the graph and fell asleep.

When I got up I remembered while making a cuppa and looked on the internet; I don't remember it being that hard but essentially it was indeed what I thought, which is good going since the last time I did this stuff was in the 70's in 'A' level.

Two hours later I'm on my way out and notice a very cold cup of

Dickens enjoyed many a drink here and must have seen this clock

http://images107.fotki.com/v70/photos/1/1529911/9740861/_MG_3210_hf-vi.jpg

I always pause the DVD and read the vanity cards at the end of TBBT - they're a great idea and you feel you're in a secret, clandestine world with Chuck and his thoughts. I have a theory that those numbers are completely arbitrary, though.

Nope. See that link I provided. You'll find all of his vanity cards going back to Darma & Greg's first one.