“Due to our anxiety over the future and our guilt over the past, we ignore and flee the present. Our lives are so bound up in living falsely toward the past and falsely toward the future that the momentous gift of the present is unreceived. We experience an inattentive, absentee existence, which disregards the promise of the now ... Receive each moment afresh as a new arena for value actualization. This is what our time should be filled with: receiving and creating contextual values. But instead we are ‘bored’ with this now. Because of our preoccupation with the dead past and the possible future, our ears are dulled to the address of reality in the moment. Instead of experiencing the fullness of time in the present, as if now were eternity entering time, we feel on our hands the slow emptiness of time. Instead of understanding this moment as the only moment we actually ever live, we feel that this moment is perhaps the dullest, least interesting of all. It is only some past moment that we cherish, or only some future moment which we idealize as fulfilling for us. So we play a game with time, pretending a glorious past and a promising future, but no present. Although it is a fantasy, we take the game with a certain absurd seriousness. In our romanticism we dream of those good old days, and in our messianism we dream of the great deliverances to come; but in the meantime we live as if the present had no being, or as if its being had no value. Real values and meanings lie behind us and before us in time, but certainly not now. Like the characters in Waiting for Godot, we wait for something that is constantly meeting us. The one we wait for visits us every day, but we do not recognize him, since we cannot believe he could be so near.” ~ Thomas C. Oden, The Structure of Awareness, 188.
