My wife looked at the calendar the other day and said, "February is almost over. I can't believe it's almost March. The year is already one-sixth over!"
Time does seem to pass more quickly as we get older. It doesn't, but course, but it seems that way. When I was a kid, time seemed to pass so slowly. Each year was a decade, and each decade seemed like a century. Now as I approach half a century old, each year seems like a month, and each month like a week.
Where do we live in time? Roughly speaking, we can live either in the future, the past, or the present.
My wife lives in the future. She makes plans. She works toward her goals. She slaves toward a future time when she will be free and complete. My aunt lives in the past. Over eighty now, she seems to be losing her short-term memory, but her vision of the past is as clear as ever. I know most of these stories by heart, and often I tire of them, but she never seems to.
I try to live in the present. I want to be like Thoreau, who wrote in Walden, "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in." In another place, he says this, words I try to live by:
"In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line."
I try to live this way, to live in the present moment, but it is hard. Often I find myself living in the future like my wife; just as often, I find myself living in the past, like my aunt. But I know that the only place I really live is right now, right at this moment.
That is why playing the mandolin is so vital in my life. When I play music, I am living my life the way I want to, the way I know life is to be lived. I can only play the note that is before me, right now, at this present moment. Each moment that I play, each note that I pick, I am living in the eternal present. I can't change the notes I have just played. The notes I am about to play are not real, do not exist yet. The only reality is the note I play right now, a note at the meeting of two eternities. This note, right now, is my life. This note I play right now proves I am alive.
At Merlefest a few years ago, I sat close to Tony Rice and Sam Bush as they played on the small hillside stage. The way Sam played that afternoon forever changed my approach to music. At each moment, he seemed to be putting every bit of himself into the notes he played. I decided then that I would try to play like that. Not that I would play like Sam Bush, but that I would try to put every bit of myself into every note I played, for the rest of my life. No mailing it in. No coasting. No matter where I was playing, with whom, or what, I would try to pour every bit of myself into the note I was playing at any time.
I haven't always succeeded in this since that day, but I have tried. And that's really the secret to the way to live my life: "to stand on the meeting of two eternities." To stand there, and play a mandolin.
© 1999 John Bird
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